Sanchez finally spotted the gun, flipped over at the bottom of the fence and already half-buried under dust. One side of it was grit-encrusted where Axl had kicked it across five lanes of road, tiny diodes now opaque and frosted.

‘Sweet fucking Nazarene…’ Sanchez was talking to himself, which wasn’t something he did often. This was a man who existed on the absolute surface of life and liked it there. He had his own reasons for not going deeper, rooted in childhood and poverty but then most people in Day Effé did.

‘…a gun that talks back.’ Sanchez knew about weapons like that. Every two-bit detective in the novelas had one, that and an Italian suit and a big American car. But this was life and that was tri-D.

‘Yeah,’ said the Colt, as the pimp finally opened the door of his ancient white Merc and sauntered casually towards the bank. ‘Clever boy.’

For a split second Sanchez was tempted to kick the Colt through the fence and into a storm drain beyond. Let the piece of shit see how well it managed to insult him when it was drowning in five scummy inches of untreated sewage.

But greed won out, as the gun knew it would. Common sense, Sanchez called it. He didn’t have a problem with greed. He didn’t have a problem with it at all. And Sanchez knew just what he was looking at.

Guns came in three grades, requiring three different types of licence, if you were the kind of person who bothered about what was once called paperwork. There were Nightclub specials, die-stamped out of steel or laser cut from cheap ceramic. These had no chips inside at all, not even for basic voice activation. Next were chipped weapons. They could switch between loads, eject empty clips on demand, adjust their own sights under orders. Neat stuff and the most anyone could hope for, until Colt-MSG/T teamed up with Linux, Gates y Turing and guns went AI.

Smart guns listened, gave advice. In fact they gave so much advice that Colt were forced to get purchasers to sign exclusion clauses stating they understood their gun wasn’t always right, that it could make mistakes and the manufacturers weren’t financially liable for the results of those it did make.

Which hadn’t stopped the guns talking or the owners from listening ...

‘Hey,’ the Colt waited until Sanchez was leant right over it, ‘you and me, we could be really good together, right?’

Five lanes away, on the other edge of the southbound, two policemen were laying into a man with riot sticks. That man was on the ground, curled up in a ball out of Sanchez’s line of sight. But even across the lines of idling traffic Sanchez could hoar the rhythmic thud that accompanied the rise and fall of riot sticks as cops beat whoever it was to pulp.

It was Axl, obviously. And they were hammering the last memories of music out of his head. Kicking the final echoes of soundtrack into red silence. Up above, in a CySat/C3N copter, a woman leaned out of its perspex bubble as she explained what was going on below, talking rapidly into a throat mike. And standing by the central crash barrier was a Japanese tourist vidcaming the violence: alternating between grabbing shots of the falling riotsticks and bowing respectfully to the backs of the two policemen, who were completely oblivious to being filmed.

By the time an Ishie roared up on a dirt bike, bowed to no one and began uploading live to the Web, feeding the datastream from the Zeisscam set in his right eye, Sanchez was back in his Merc with the engine humming. Seconds later he was reversing his vehicle along the hard shoulder towards a turn-off 200 yards behind him.

‘Hey, Sanchez!’

The pimp saw one of his girls jerk upright to stare in surprise. He ignored her. Later on he’d come back for them, and maybe they’d still be there and maybe not. Either way, he could always get some more. Street kids were two a dollar in Mexico City, literally. Guns like the Colt couldn’t be bought for money alone. And whatever Sanchez liked to tell others he didn’t have those kind of contacts.

Not yet.

Ignoring the hostile stares of other drivers, Sanchez ran his white Merc with fins back to the turnoff, cruising past the frozen traffic like a prowling shark in reverse. If he cut up Via Sullivan and then doubled back along Antonio Caso he could be at his bar in the Alameda inside forty minutes, maybe less.

‘War… what is it good for,’ sang the newspaper vendor, badly.

Sanchez slid his card down the vendor’s slot and yanked out a fresh copy of the Post. It was a crude print-out of the newsfeed, ink still sticky on its surface, the hyperlinks all dutifully underlined but useless, going nowhere…

The civil war in Spain was almost over. Italy’s national bank was in the hands of the World Monetary Fund. Only the Vatican was refusing to be audited. Holding out politely but firmly under the orders of Mexico’s own Declan Begley, better known as His Excellency Cardinal Santo Duque.

In London, the Prime Minister was defending the WorldBank arms embargo that had led to the slaughter of unarmed liberals in Valencia, on the grounds that allowing both sides to be armed would only have extended the war.

None of that got read by Sanchez.

The shooting on the Paseo de la Counter-Reformacion was relegated to a two-line snip at the bottom of the sheet, two-thirds of the way down late-breaking news. Sanchez didn’t bother to read that either.

Half an hour later it would make headlines when an AI at DFPD finally reminded everyone who the dead man was. But at the moment CySat/Mex’s ex-CEO was just another body in the morgue.

‘Enjoy your read,’ said the vendor and Sanchez kicked it, his boot ricocheting off its reinforced metal sides. The machine picked itself up with as much dignity as a knee-high cube can manage and shut its front flap with a loud clang.

‘Everyone’s a critic’ The vendor stamped off up the road, stopped briefly outside a review bar and then kept going towards a more upscale part of town.

‘Coward,’ Sanchez shouted after it. The machine ignored him, but a Swedish girl in a red crop top stopped long enough to give Sanchez a quizzical stare. Then she was gone too, pulled up the sidewalk by a blond boyfriend who muttered something rapidly in her ear.

She had good tits and an even better ass. Sanchez looked after her, considering. Then he patted the Colt tucked into his silver and leather belt, shook his head sadly and headed towards his bar. For once, Sanchez had better things to do than chase after tourists. Like take a good look at his new toy.

Between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m., south of Alameda was tourist town. After that, most tourists went back to their high-rise Marriotts or Plazas in the Zona Rosa to eat almost-Mexican food and watch Brazilian porn, while those the quarter really belonged to came out to count that day’s takings and drink cold beer in the cafés the tourists had only just left.

As an arrangement it worked well, except for the occasional backpacker stupid enough to hang around in search of the ‘real’ Mexico. A quick punch in the gut, a knee to the face and they woke up with a hangover-sized headache, no watch and an empty wallet if they were lucky. The rest never woke up at all.

Sanchez grinned. He’d rolled his share, back when he was a kid and before franchised vats meant stealing kidneys wasn’t worth the prison sentence. Who hadn’t? But he’d moved on since then, gone respectable. These days he ran five whores and had a major share in nightclub. Hell, he was practically a tax payer.

And he wasn’t a killer, either. Which wasn’t to say he hadn’t killed. He had, but not for fun, not for a long time and only in the line of business. Sure, some of his donors had died, but only the stupid ones who didn’t bother to read his instructions when they awoke. After they’d donated, Sanchez used to pack their limp bodies in ice and leave them in a bath with printed instructions to call 0800 HELP-HELP-HELP and ask for surgical emergency when they awoke.