Neo Nights

“Do you know what a rail gun does to the human body?” Garson asked.

Felix Martin was five-eight. He was heavy-set but only in the middle. A body built from booze and drugs and zip meals and a complacency that rippled through the rest of his body. His arms were flaccid aftershocks of his negligence. His posture was poor, his back hunched as he held his arms up. His face was scarred and pitted. He was ugly, and stupid, and indifferent to what went on around him, and that made him horrible.

And he was uncomfortable, and that made Garson very happy.

Felix shrugged, and Garson paced around him.

“Come on. No interest at all?”

Felix shrugged again, looking slightly more nervous.

Felix would have preferred a different venue for their interrogation. Sure. Maybe he wanted a sammie—extra onion, extra artificial flavoring please. Would a vape be too much to ask for? No, of course not Felix. You like the gan-green flavor, don’t you? That’s the stuff that has your teeth stained that awful color, that’s the stuff you spew into the air night after night at the Mojito bar in neo NoHo.

Garson continued his circuit around the man, watching as his shoulders tensed. If Garson was older, he would say he was spinning like a record, like one of those hipster relics they still showed in nostalgia flicks from before the 2000s, the kind his dad was always going on about. Used to go on about. He said it was something about the sound of them that made them special. But that was all in the ago. In the bygone days before the neo lights lit the sky and everyone was aug’ed. Before everyone had given up on being human. Before a kid with a gun.

“I don’t know anything about whatever this is,” Felix said. He was sweating despite the cold. No streetlights here, no neo night to light him up, but Garson could see the fear and unease there all the same. The electric hum from the bulk container ship behind them would drown out most noises, but not the kind Garson planned to make tonight.

“That’s a surprise,” Garson said, and his boots crunched down on broken glass. “Tell me about guns, Felix. That’s what you do, right? That’s what you know?”

From across the bay came the audio boom of the nine o’clock hour. Tonight it was Cola-Nade sponsoring their little chat, and Garson paused to see the drones fill the city sky and bleed white and red. They swirled and danced, and the audio boom came again.

“COLA-NADE. IT’S IN THE BLOOD,” commanded the electric god. Then the drones dimmed, and they went back to their regularly sponsored duties, to their ads and their lights and their patrols.

“That wasn’t rhetorical,” Garson said, and he took the barrel of his Glock 88 and pressed it into Felix’s swollen, pregnant midsection.

“I don’t know what you want, pig,” Felix said.

“Humor me. Tell me everything you know about a rail gun.”

“I don’t know anything about a rail gun,” Felix said. “Can I lower my damn hands?”

His arms were shaking. He had never had to hold anything up in his life, let alone his damn hands.

“No,” Garson answered. “Tell me everything you know about the CP-15.”

“Man, I don’t—”

“No,” Garson answered again, but this time he grabbed Felix’s outstretched finger, from his outstretched arm, and he broke it in half.

Felix shrieked, and this, too, made Garson happy.

“Imagine I’m a kid looking to hit a rival gang, but I need spread. I don’t want to miss. Read me the manual, Felix. Sell me.”

“It’s an AR-15 style semi-automatic,” Felix gasped, cradling his snapped finger. He was happy just to lower his arms, Garson thought.

“Tell me how many rounds it fires.”

“Unmodified?”

“You piece of shit,” Garson laughed, and he reached for another finger, but Felix backed away. He fell when his laceless boots hit a carbon pallet. The hazard light of the docks flashed. If the docks registered any bio-fall, they would automatically turn on and start flashing warnings, send an automatic message to the safety regulator, and immediately look for the bio registry of the fallee so they could notify a supervisor.

That was grand. The future was grand, but none of that mattered because no one was on this dock at one in the morning, and no one would be for at least another hour, maybe only when the sirens came. So the hazard light went off, orange spinning light strobing above their heads, warning of danger. But it was just the two of them.

Garson pointed his 88 at the flashing light and watched it explode as he pulled the trigger.

“Jesus!” Felix cried.

“Not here,” Garson said, and holstered the gun. “Not tonight.”

“I’m not saying shit,” Felix spat. “You’re insane, you fucking opp.”

“Do you know what the strategy of your average bottom dweller is?” Garson asked, going onto his haunches, his hands hanging on his knees. “It’s to puff out its chest, to learn to look big so that the sodomites and the murders and the pimps don’t get a hold of them. So that they respect them.”

 He reached out his hand.

“Need a hand up from down there, Felix?”

Felix stumbled away and flipped onto his belly. He tried to crawl, but his broken finger caught on the asphalt, and he cried out and fell again.

“Bottom dwellers learn to act big,” Garson said, stretching to his full height, walking behind Felix. “That’s what is important, right? Hanging at the bars, calling at the girls, laughing at the boys and their stories of murder—it’s all about maintaining image. Gotta keep cool at any cost. That’s what they taught you, isn’t it Felix? Hang with the young kids. Sell them their big toys. Laugh along when they talk about lighting up a small neighborhood grocery store.”

“Help!” Felix shouted.

“Shush little rattler,” Garson hushed. It was what his father had always called him as a child, because his cries came rattling out his throat.  “It’s okay, Felix. No need for cool here. There’s no one to impress. No customers. I just want some answers. No more finger snapping. I promise.”

Felix wiped spittle from his chin and looked around uneasily.

“Thirty rounds. It’s thirty rounds.”

Garson whistled.

“How many times you think someone is gonna miss if they need so many? Seems like a bullet could get misplaced.”

“I don’t know what this is about,” Felix said.

“No one ever does,” Garson answered, and he hated that the sadness and the anger wasn’t hidden in his voice. He hated that Felix got that gift. Felix with his weak arms and his weak back.

“Get up, Felix,” Garson commanded.

Felix hesitated, and it was obvious how even now he was looking at himself from the outside, like he could only see himself as others saw him.

“Come on, come on,” Garson motioned. “I’m done with the tough guy act.”

He did stand, but he did it petulantly, reluctantly. Like a child.

“Okay, last question, Felix. If you answer it, I’ll let you go.”

There was skepticism there, but Felix didn’t move or run or mewl. He just stared with his jutted out lip, holding his jutting out finger.

“If someone bought a gun from you, would you remember? Would you remember what they looked like? Maybe one three months back. The night of the Nike-Nade.”

“I wouldn’t. People pass through all the time,” Felix said, and there was no hesitation. None at all. And Garson looked at his weak knees, and his weak arms, and his weak chin.

“All right,” Garson shrugged. “Time to walk.”

He knew Felix wouldn’t walk beside him, because showing respect was beyond his limited mental powers, so he would slink behind, and he would plot to strike from a future time, and a future place, and a future shadow. Whatever would raise him in the esteem of the other bottom-dwellers.

“This dock is usually bustling,” Garson said, glancing over his shoulder. He was moving now, moving back the way they came, back to the car he had first dragged Felix blubbering from. “They shut it down and closed it off because Helios gave the say so. Imagine that? Whole city just stops operating at the dock because a corporation gives the no-go. That’s power.”

Garson waved at the neo-night across the bay.

“Remember when we used to measure things by moments—by balls dropping in Times Square, or by parades, or by when our dads took us for ice cream? We cared about family. Now it’s all by whatever Nade is on that night. I could recite to you the last forty two nights just by that. Which Nade was on. My dad used to say to measure life in moments and memories, and nothing else mattered. He used to say.”

Garson laughed.

“Imagine thinking that far back. Three months.”

“Yeah, I don’t know no one that could remember that far back,” Felix said. There was a challenge there, but all the fight had left Garson. Because Felix wasn’t someone to reason with, not when his foresight extended only to the esteem of the other cockroaches.

“Anyway, supposedly Helios has a new shipment coming in,” Garson continued. “They said it was the rail guns for the national guard. That’s why I was asking you, a guy who knows gun. Who knows what they do to people. I thought you might be interested. But I guess once a gun leaves the hands of the seller, it isn’t anyone’s problem anymore, right? Helios doesn’t have anything to do with that rail gun anymore, or whatever the person who has it does with it.”

Garson stopped, and he heard Felix stop behind him. He turned to look Felix in the face, to see what was there, one last time. He was farther away than Garson thought he would be, but he was close enough. There wasn’t any recognition at all. Not an ounce of fucking understanding.

“Do you know what a rail gun does to a human body?” Garson asked again.

And this time, Felix told him.

The door of the shipping container shrieked as a hole the size of a basketball exploded out of it, and Garson was glad he aug’ed his ears two years back. He was glad he synched them down so the noise didn’t blow out his eardrums, because this was louder than the Nade at nine o’clock. It was the loudest thing Garson had ever heard. A single tragic shriek that rent the night sky. It reminded Garson of a noise he had made three months back, when a kid looking for some spread had opened up on a grocery store. And it was so loud, they probably heard it across the bay.

They didn’t hear Felix’s answer though, not across the bay. But Garson did. Even through his aug’ed out ears, he heard Felix tell him.

A rail gun would blow a hole right through a human being, Felix said. A hypervelocity projectile passing at Mach 9. It would be so loud it would split the sound barrier in half, and travel so fast that the hydrostatic shock would kill whatever it hit well before the aftereffects of the crater it made in their chest. It would create a pressure wave that traveled through the body so fiercely it would cause immediate neural death, which is in addition to the disruption of autonomic nervous system pathways that would stun you if you weren’t already collapsed in on yourself in the heap of flesh that was left of you.

A human body, hit by a rail gun, would quite literally die not knowing what hit it. And it wouldn’t even slow the bullet, which would continue to fly, out through the docks, past the other shipping containers in the lane, and it would go straight to sea, where 100 miles away, it would finally decelerate enough to hit the ocean and end its trajectory.

That’s exactly what it would do, Felix told him. And that was all he needed to say.

So Garson synched his ears back up in time to hear the sirens. He had blown out the hazard light at the dock, but the noise dosimeter from the city would have picked this up, and it would be wailing for a while now, trying to figure out what attack on its city could be that loud. Not that Garson minded. He knew what would happen. He knew he still had to ditch the little trigger in his hand. The one he’d picked up last week from his friend at Helios, right after he’d found out who Felix was.

So Garson didn’t run. Instead, he walked to what was left of Felix, and he crouched in front of the mass that was no longer human. Garson thought about that, how far most of them had come from humanity, and how the people who could tell them, the ones who still knew, were dying out, or being exterminated.

There was nothing left to say. There were no answers left to get.

Life sure was different from what his dad used to tell him.

It sure was.