Nightside CIty Read Online Free PDF Page B

not
even temporarily, and nobody ever caught the house cheating, but it
played up this fantasy image of dangerous, decadent Old New York,
which is supposedly this ancient, corrupt city back on Earth, and I
avoided it because some of the customers got a little vague about
the line between fantasy and reality, and the management, by all
accounts, was willing to let things get fairly rough before
intervening. It helped the image they wanted.
    I knew that image, but I didn’t know much
more than that, so I punched in some orders and read what came up
on the screen.
    The New York Townhouse Hotel and Gambling
Hall was owned by the New York Games Corporation, a wholly-owned
subsidiary of Nakada Enterprises, incorporated on Prometheus. I’d
heard of them, of course—not New York Games, Nakada Enterprises.
Everybody had heard of the Nakada family. They weren’t very active
on Epimetheus, but they were sure as hell all over the rest of the
Eta Cass system, and probably every other inhabited planet I’d ever
heard of, as well. They’d been one of the founding families on
Prometheus.
    I never heard that they had any connection
with Old New York, or Old Old York, or much of anything else back
on Earth, but that didn’t mean much. Maybe they just liked the
name, or maybe their marketing people suggested it; I didn’t see
anything about it on the files I was reading.
    Getting back to the casino itself, the
manager’s name was Vijay Vo. I’d heard of him slightly, as he was
active in assorted civic groups and reputed to be a damn good
businessman, but I’d never met him; not my social circle, and sure
as hell not my age group. He’d been working there since the place
opened, in 2258, so he wasn’t exactly young any more, and probably
knew one hell of a lot by this time. He answered to the Nakada
family, as represented on Epimetheus by Sayuri Nakada, whose name I
knew from celebrity gossip on the nets. She answered to old Yoshio
Nakada himself, the head of the clan back on Prometheus, who made
Vo look like a beginner.
    The property had no liens against it. New
York Games had no other assets on Epimetheus, no other tangible
assets reported anywhere—but reporting requirements were light.
Stock in Nakada Enterprises was not presently available to the
public, so I couldn’t get at any reports to stockholders or other
internal records. Reported crimes in the New York included hundreds
of thefts, assaults, rapes, com violations, and so forth, back over
the hundred and eight years the casino had been in business, but no
more than most of the other casinos. The New York had been the
second casino to offer its players false-name accounts on a formal
basis, following the lead of the long-defunct Las Vegas III.
    The Vegas— that brought back memories.
When I was five I watched the salvage machines eat away the old
shell of the Vegas; those things scared the hell out of me, the way
they chewed through the plastic and cultured concrete like it was
tofu. I had this horrible idea that the building’s internal com
systems might still be conscious the whole time.
    Las Vegas—that was a weird name. There’s only
one Vega; I’ve checked the star-charts. The casino was the Las
Vegas III, though. I don’t know any more about I and II than I know
why the name’s plural and the article Spanish. Nobody on Epimetheus
speaks Spanish. I suppose some of the big intelligences must know
it, but I never heard it spoken, and it wasn’t available on any of
the vids.
    After the casino was gone they had made the
site a park, though not much of one; the imported grass had all
died pretty quickly, despite the fancy lights and watering system.
I think the metals in the soil and water got to it.
    Nobody had wanted to build there, since
everyone knew that the sun was coming up. That hadn’t been news
since long before I was born.
    I wasn’t checking on the Vegas, though, I was
checking on the New York. I’ve always had this habit of going off
on tangents