Chapter One: Secretariat
The oddly slanted windows of the 17th story appartment, slick with rain from the damp beating Shinjuku was taking that morning, were quickly become soiled with tiny, yellowed dots of sulphur. Pope remembers the forecast, delivered yesterday in cheerful Japanese, and it said nothing about acid rain. He rolls haphazardly off the futon, his head almost touching the place where the floor-to-ceiling windows touch the tatami mats and stands uneasily, using his clammy hands against the glass as leverage to pull himself up.
He turns around, slumped slightly against the window for a time, before bending over, uncertain as to pick up his crumpled pack of Dunhills and his lighter, or rather, the dark Jean Paul Gaultier sheets with which to cover his nakedness. He opts for the latter, leaning there in the half light of the appartment, the morning gloom behind him, looking like a cosmonaut prepared for sleep, standing up with the blanket tucked around him so.
'I have to work today, I can leave you a key, if you'd like.' She says from the bathroom, bent over the sink, her dark hair in wet, matted ropes as she blindly pierces a coconut with a multi-driver and pours it's contents over her scalp.
'When do you think you'll be back?' Pope asks, relenting on the idea of a cigarettes, slumping cross legged there, pushing a small plasma monitor aside with his bare foot.
She flicks her hair back and ties it, revealing the pale, half Japanese features that had attracted him to her in the first place, an implicit sadness behind those dark, almond eyes; something unspoken by the nature of her epicanthic folds.
'Tomorrow, maybe the next day.' She sighs, turning towards him.
He didn't know who she was last night, in the smokey Roppingi nightclub; not that he reasoned he should have. She belonged to a new breed of Sense/Net stars who attempted to transcend the bland, universality of meta-celebrities like Tally Isham. Something about a long running simstim about a female assassin; cult following, especially here in Japan and in the former sov-bloc. He didn't know about her arm last night either, and now his eyes were drawn to it as she dressed. A newer prosthetic, identical skin tone to her shoulder, and impossible to tell from the real thing if not for the faint seam where the trodes track her cortex's requests at only a microsecound's delay from her real arm. Last night, when he held her against the futon before the rain hit the coast and it was a distant rumble out toward Okinawa, he noticed it was devoid of the downy hairs her right arm had, and in the silence they shared together afterwards, he could hear tiny servo's in her finger joints whir as they clenched the pillow they shared instinctively.
'I think they get addicted to the way it feels...' She says as he depresses an almost invisible stud near her elbow to remove it, lathering the scarred stump just below her shoulder with a jelly that improves reception on the trodes of the subtle movements there that imply what her fingers should be doing. 'I'm told, when they're rigged, you can't feel the prosthesis, only the absence of the limb, but in post-production phantom pains can be programmed in.'
'Your character...' Pope says around the cigarette, his cheek pressed against the glass and staring down at the heavy traffic below, 'does she have an arm? Or is that the gimmick?'
She smiles at that, replacing the prosthesis and pulling on an elbow length black glove. "No, she has some kind of kinetic plasma weapon grafted onto the arm she lost in the war. We edit it in during post production. Seamless, apparently, so all I have to do is wave it around where they tell me...'
That draws his eyes to the seam where it sockets it's self, as she wipes seaping lubricant from there with a tissue.
'My first name's Chloe, by the way. Father's Japanese.' She says flipantly as she stuffs various items into a tote bag to take with her.
'Pope.' He says. His clothes have been neatly pressed and put on a stainless steel hanger by her wardrobe. The thin fabrics of the pants and shirt he bought from a Japanese Prada boutique yesterday look too small for his broad shouldered form as he lets the blanket drop to change, they stretch across his swimmer's build. She musses his hair slightly and kisses him on the forehead. 'Leave your number with the maid, okay?'
Then she was out the door, leaving the tall man with the hunted expression alone amidst the gray simplicity of her appartment, pulling on the thin v-neck sweater he brought with him, he moves to her kitchen, and to the stainless steel trash can, shined to a killing gloss that he sees his unshaven face reflected in, he pulls out the Ruger he had the sense to stash their when she'd dragged him to her home. Even though he can be certain no one has touched it since the night before, he still checks the clip and makes sure a round is chambered, flicking on the safety before he tucks it into the waist band of his pants, where only the black mil-spec handle juts out against the surface of his abdominals, he goes to the glass doored refrigerator, opening it too a blast of long chain micro polymers; absent mindedly touching the logo on the butt of his pistol, the raises texture of it, 'PROPERTY OF THE UNITED NATIONS'.
The oddly slanted windows of the 17th story appartment, slick with rain from the damp beating Shinjuku was taking that morning, were quickly become soiled with tiny, yellowed dots of sulphur. Pope remembers the forecast, delivered yesterday in cheerful Japanese, and it said nothing about acid rain. He rolls haphazardly off the futon, his head almost touching the place where the floor-to-ceiling windows touch the tatami mats and stands uneasily, using his clammy hands against the glass as leverage to pull himself up.
He turns around, slumped slightly against the window for a time, before bending over, uncertain as to pick up his crumpled pack of Dunhills and his lighter, or rather, the dark Jean Paul Gaultier sheets with which to cover his nakedness. He opts for the latter, leaning there in the half light of the appartment, the morning gloom behind him, looking like a cosmonaut prepared for sleep, standing up with the blanket tucked around him so.
'I have to work today, I can leave you a key, if you'd like.' She says from the bathroom, bent over the sink, her dark hair in wet, matted ropes as she blindly pierces a coconut with a multi-driver and pours it's contents over her scalp.
'When do you think you'll be back?' Pope asks, relenting on the idea of a cigarettes, slumping cross legged there, pushing a small plasma monitor aside with his bare foot.
She flicks her hair back and ties it, revealing the pale, half Japanese features that had attracted him to her in the first place, an implicit sadness behind those dark, almond eyes; something unspoken by the nature of her epicanthic folds.
'Tomorrow, maybe the next day.' She sighs, turning towards him.
He didn't know who she was last night, in the smokey Roppingi nightclub; not that he reasoned he should have. She belonged to a new breed of Sense/Net stars who attempted to transcend the bland, universality of meta-celebrities like Tally Isham. Something about a long running simstim about a female assassin; cult following, especially here in Japan and in the former sov-bloc. He didn't know about her arm last night either, and now his eyes were drawn to it as she dressed. A newer prosthetic, identical skin tone to her shoulder, and impossible to tell from the real thing if not for the faint seam where the trodes track her cortex's requests at only a microsecound's delay from her real arm. Last night, when he held her against the futon before the rain hit the coast and it was a distant rumble out toward Okinawa, he noticed it was devoid of the downy hairs her right arm had, and in the silence they shared together afterwards, he could hear tiny servo's in her finger joints whir as they clenched the pillow they shared instinctively.
'I think they get addicted to the way it feels...' She says as he depresses an almost invisible stud near her elbow to remove it, lathering the scarred stump just below her shoulder with a jelly that improves reception on the trodes of the subtle movements there that imply what her fingers should be doing. 'I'm told, when they're rigged, you can't feel the prosthesis, only the absence of the limb, but in post-production phantom pains can be programmed in.'
'Your character...' Pope says around the cigarette, his cheek pressed against the glass and staring down at the heavy traffic below, 'does she have an arm? Or is that the gimmick?'
She smiles at that, replacing the prosthesis and pulling on an elbow length black glove. "No, she has some kind of kinetic plasma weapon grafted onto the arm she lost in the war. We edit it in during post production. Seamless, apparently, so all I have to do is wave it around where they tell me...'
That draws his eyes to the seam where it sockets it's self, as she wipes seaping lubricant from there with a tissue.
'My first name's Chloe, by the way. Father's Japanese.' She says flipantly as she stuffs various items into a tote bag to take with her.
'Pope.' He says. His clothes have been neatly pressed and put on a stainless steel hanger by her wardrobe. The thin fabrics of the pants and shirt he bought from a Japanese Prada boutique yesterday look too small for his broad shouldered form as he lets the blanket drop to change, they stretch across his swimmer's build. She musses his hair slightly and kisses him on the forehead. 'Leave your number with the maid, okay?'
Then she was out the door, leaving the tall man with the hunted expression alone amidst the gray simplicity of her appartment, pulling on the thin v-neck sweater he brought with him, he moves to her kitchen, and to the stainless steel trash can, shined to a killing gloss that he sees his unshaven face reflected in, he pulls out the Ruger he had the sense to stash their when she'd dragged him to her home. Even though he can be certain no one has touched it since the night before, he still checks the clip and makes sure a round is chambered, flicking on the safety before he tucks it into the waist band of his pants, where only the black mil-spec handle juts out against the surface of his abdominals, he goes to the glass doored refrigerator, opening it too a blast of long chain micro polymers; absent mindedly touching the logo on the butt of his pistol, the raises texture of it, 'PROPERTY OF THE UNITED NATIONS'.