city blues 01 - dome city blues Read Online Free PDF

like a suicide.  Sounds simple enough.”
    I walked toward the kitchen.  “You want some breakfast?”
    She got up to follow me.  “Breakfast?  It’s after one o’clock.”
    “I had a late night.”
    She pulled a small stack of pictures out of her purse and handed it to me.
    Most of them were trids, but a few were old two-dimensional photographs.  I thumbed through them quickly.  “What are these?” I asked.
    “Just some pictures of Mike.”
    “I already know what your brother looked like, Ms. Winter; I saw the vid.”
    “That video is a fake.  I don’t know how it was done, or who did it, but my brother did not do those things.”  She pointed to the stack of pics.  “The real Michael Winter is in there , Mr. Stalin.  I just wanted you to know a little bit about him.”
    She stood with her arms crossed.  The look on her face said she expected me to disagree.
    “Okay,” I said.  “I’ll look at your pictures.”
    She exhaled and uncrossed her arms.  “Will you take the case?”
    “I’ll think about it.”
    “You will?”
    I started rummaging through the kitchen cabinets, looking for my favorite skillet.  House knew where it was, but I wasn’t about to ask him.
    “I’m retired, Ms. Winter.  Your story intrigues me, but I really am out of the business.  I promise to give your request honest consideration, but if I decide against taking the case, you’ll have to accept my decision.  Agreed?”
    She extended her hand.  I shook it.  Her grip was firm.  Her hand was warm, fingers long, nails unpainted.  “Agreed.”
     

CHAPTER 3

    The next evening, I left the Zone and rode the westbound Lev to Dome 15, West Hollywood.
    Nexus Dreams was a specialty bar on Santa Monica Boulevard, catering to jackers, wannabe’s, and techno-groupies.
    The club’s holo-facade was a live video feed of the street outside the front doors, pumped through a processor and rendered in simple polygon graphics.  The result was a cartoonish video-mirror of the street scene in which all people and objects within about fifteen meters of the bar appeared as computer icons.
    I watched my own icon grow larger as I approached the front of the club.  My head appeared as a truncated pyramid, my body as two rectangular boxes (a short one for my pelvis, and a taller one for my trunk) and my arms and legs were jointed cylinders.
    I walked past my polygon doppelganger, and into the club.  The decor inside was intended to suggest a jacker’s-eye view of the DataNet: matte black floor, walls, and ceiling divided into neat one-meter squares by low intensity florescent blue lasers.  The tables and stools were transparent acryliflex, edge-lit in bright primary colors.  Slash-rock pounded out of hidden speakers, an abrasive, atonal barrage masquerading as music.
    At twenty after nine, the club was packed: a shoulder-to-shoulder swarm of human beings that seemed to writhe and pulsate in time to the arrhythmic beat of the music.
    I fought my way to the bar and wedged myself into a narrow opening between a muscle-boy with florescent tattoos on his face and an androgynous albino dressed in black wet-look osmotic-neoprene.  The albino’s fingernails were black acrylic, long and pointed like tiny obsidian daggers.  His/her features and complexion were flawless testimonials to the possibilities of elective surgery.
    When I finally got the bartender’s attention, I tried to order a Cutty on the rocks, and received a blank stare in return.  I looked at the neon-colored drinks everyone else was having and decided that a beer was my safest bet.
    The beer came in a purple octagonal squeeze-tube with raised Chinese characters on the label.  I squirted some into my mouth; it tasted like cold aftershave.
    I scanned the room.  I was looking for Zeus, a data-jacker who had hung out here once-upon-a-time, back when Stalin and Stalin Investigations had still been a going concern.  We’d hired Zeus several times, when our need for