The joys of trickledown.

Belacotton Kohei Nine Point Twenty-Six showed a faint glow in one upper window and the long restless tongues of shadows in the light that seeped from under the half cranked loading-bay shutter gave the building the look of a one-eyed, drooling maniac. I slid to the wall and dialled up the synthetic sleeve’s auditory circuits for what they were worth, which wasn’t much. Voices leaked out into the street, fitful as the shadows at my feet.

“—telling you, I’m not going to hang around for that.”

It was a Millsport accent, the drawling metropolitan twang of Harlan’s World Amanglic dragged up to an irritated jag. Plex’s voice, muttering below sense-making range, made soft provincial counterpoint. He seemed to be asking a question.

“How the fuck would I know that? Believe what you want.” Plex’s companion was moving about, handling things. His voice faded back in the echoes of the loading bay. I caught the words kaikyo, matter, a chopped laugh. Then again, coming closer to the shutter “—matters is what the family believes, and they’ll believe what the technology tells them. Technology leaves a trail, my friend.” A sharp coughing and indrawn breath that sounded like recreational chemicals going down. “This guy is fucking late.”

I frowned. Kaikyo has a lot of meanings, but they all depend on how old you are. Geographically, it’s a strait or a channel. That’s early Settlement Years use, or just hyper-educated, kanji-scribbling, First Families pretension.

This guy didn’t sound First Family, but there was no reason he couldn’t have been around back when Konrad Harlan and his well connected pals were turning Glimmer VI into their own personal backyard.

Plenty of old personalities still on stack from that far back, just waiting to be downloaded into a working sleeve. Come to that, you wouldn’t need to re-sleeve more than a half dozen times, end to end, to live through the whole of Harlan’s World’s human history anyway. It’s still not much over four centuries, earth standard, since the colony barges made planetfall.

Envoy intuition twisted about in my head. It felt wrong. I’d met men and women with centuries of continuous life behind them and they didn’t talk like this guy. This wasn’t the wisdom of ages, drawling out into the Tekitomura night over pipe fumes.

On the street, scavenged into the argot of Stripjap a couple of hundred years later, kaikyo means a contact who can shift stolen goods. A covert flow manager. In some parts of the Millsport Archipelago, it’s still common usage. Elsewhere, the meaning is shifting to describe aboveboard financial consultants.

Yeah, and further south it means a holy man possessed by spirits, or a sewage outlet. Enough of this detective shit. You heard the man—you’re late.

I got the heel of one hand under the edge of the shutter and hauled upward, locking up the tidal rip of pain from my wound as well as the synthetic sleeve’s nervous system would let me. The shutter ratcheted noisily to the roof. Light fell out into the street and all over me.

“Evening.”

“Jesus!” The Millsport accent jerked back a full step. He’d only been a couple of metres away from the shutter when it went up.

“Tak.”

“Hello Plex.” My eyes stayed on the newcomer. “Who’s the tan?”

By then I already knew. Pale, tailored good looks straight out of some low-end experia flic, somewhere between Micky Nozawa and Ryu Bartok.

Well-proportioned fighter’s sleeve, bulk in the shoulders and chest, length in the limbs. Stacked hair, the way they’re doing it on the bioware catwalks these days, that upward static-twisted thing that’s meant to look like they just pulled the sleeve out of a clone tank. A suit bagged and draped to suggest hidden weaponry, a stance that said he had none he was ready to use. Combat arts crouch that was more bark than readiness to bite. He still had the discharged micro-pipe in one curled palm, and his pupils were spiked wide open. Concession to an ancient tradition put illuminum tattooed curlicues across one corner of his forehead.

Millsport yakuza apprentice. Street thug.

“You don’t call me tani,” he hissed. “You are the outsider here, Kovacs. You are the intruder.”

I left him at the periphery of my vision and looked towards Plex, who was over by the workbenches, fiddling with a knot of webbing straps and trying on a smile that didn’t want to be on his dissipated aristo face.

“Look, Tak—”

“This was strictly a private party, Plex. I didn’t ask you to subcontract the entertainment.”

The yakuza twitched forward, barely restrained. He made a grating noise deep in his throat. Plex looked panicked.

“Wait, I…” He put down the webbing with an obvious effort. “Tak, he’s here about something else.”

“He’s here on my time,” I said mildly.

“Listen, Kovacs. You fucking—”

“No.” I looked back at him as I said it, hoping he could read the bright energy in my tone for what it was. “You know who I am, you’ll stay out of my way. I’m here to see Plex, not you. Now get out.”

I don’t know what stopped him, Envoy rep, late-breaking news from the citadel—because they’ll be all over it by now, you made such a fucking mess up there—or just a cooler head than the cheap-suited punk persona suggested.

He stood braced in the door of his own rage for a moment, then stood down and displaced it, all poured into a glance at the nails of his right hand and a grin.

“Sure. You just go ahead and transact with Plex here. I’ll wait outside. Shouldn’t take long.”

He even took the first step towards the street. I looked back at Plex.

“What the fuck’s he talking about?”

Plex winced.

“We, uh, we need to reschedule, Tak. We can’t—”

“Oh no,” But looking around the room I could already see the swirled patterns in the dust where someone had been using a grav-lifter. “No, no, you told me—”

“I-I know, Tak, but—”

“I paid you.”

“I’ll give you the money—”

“I don’t want the fucking money, Plex.” I stared at him, fighting down the urge to rip his throat out. Without Plex, there was no upload. Without the upload—“I want my fucking body back!”

“It’s cool, it’s cool. You’ll get it back. It’s just right now—”

“It’s just right now, Kovacs, we’re using the facilities.” The yakuza drifted back into my line of sight, still grinning. “Because to tell the truth, they were pretty much ours in the first place. But then Plex here probably didn’t tell you that, did he?”

I shuttled a glance between them. Plex looked embarrassed.

You gotta feel sorry for the guy. Isa, my Millsport contact broker, all of fifteen years old, razored violet hair and brutally obvious archaic datarat plugs, working on world-weary reflective while she laid out the deal and the cost. Look at history, man. It fucked him over but good.

History, it was true, didn’t seem to have done Plex any favours. Born three centuries sooner with the name Kohei, he’d have been a spoilt stupid younger son with no particular need to do more than exercise his obvious intelligence in some gentleman’s pursuit like astrophysics or archaeologue science. As it was, the Kohei family had left its post-Unsettlement generations nothing but the keys to ten streets of empty warehouses and a decayed aristo charm that, in Plex’s own self-deprecating words, made it easier than you’d think to get laid when broke. Pipe-blasted, he told me the whole shabby story on less than three days’ acquaintance. He seemed to need to tell someone, and Envoys are good listeners. You listen, you file under local colour, you soak it up. Later, the recalled detail maybe saves your life.

Driven by the terror of a single lifespan and no re-sleeve, Plex’s newly impoverished ancestors learnt to work for a living, but most of them weren’t very good at it. Debt piled up, the vultures moved in. By the time Plex came along, his family were in so deep with the yakuza that low-grade criminality was just a fact of life. He’d probably grown up around aggressively slouched suits like this one. Probably learnt that embarrassed, giveup-the-ground smile at his father’s knee.