Crooked Little Vein - Warren Ellis

“I know. I saw a TV show with the guy who invented anal sex.”

“I kind of doubt that. But, you know, some women can’t get off vaginally. Some women can’t get off without a bit of the rough stuff. Porn doesn’t invent that. It reflects what’s going on in the world. And some bad easy-listening music and ten minutes of vanilla missionary doesn’t do it for everybody. Using that book in the middle of any major city would be consigning thousands of people to hell every time.”

I stabbed my last slice of apple. “So you’re saying me finding the book would make the transcontinental pervert community very unhappy, and that they would conceivably be forced to unlearn all their special pervert tricks.”

“Mike, you’re talking about lobotomizing people. Think about it: what would that book do to me?”

“You wouldn’t want to make me ejaculate into the Baby Jesus’ head anymore.”

“Two hundred years ago, the female orgasm was mostly theoretical. Hell, a hundred years ago, the male psyche didn’t have a problem with selling women. We barely got educated. Career aspirations, forget it. The 1950s looked like fucking Babylon compared to 1776. Everything that makes me me, Mike, would be wiped away. Gimme the knife.”

“With that look in your eye? I don’t think I want you to have the knife.”

“What, you’re afraid I’m going to put it up your ass and call it romance? Gimme the fucking knife.”

I watched as she pushed the apples and oranges onto a nearby coffee table, unzipped the bananas onto the plate, sliced them, cut the passion fruit, and squeezed the pulp all over them. She started eating the mess with one of the spoons, watching the TV.

There were no ashtrays visible in the place, so I decided to press some clementine peel into service and lit up. “You don’t think maybe they just want to make America a less freakier place?”

Trix eyed me, crunching a passion fruit seed. “Three thousand years ago stable homosexual relationships were mainstream in many societies all over the world. Don’t you think the current administration would consider that kind of freaky?”

“Three thousand years ago people painted themselves blue and hunted their own food with sticks. Don’t treat me like I’m an idiot, Trix.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is that maybe, just maybe, America would get along fine without people who fuck dogs.”

“So you’re equating stable homosexual relationships with dogfucking.”

“Actually, no. You are. So why don’t you put down your studenty bullshit for one minute and talk to me like an adult?”

“Oh, fuck you, Mike. Maybe it’s a bigger subject than two people can deal with over breakfast, okay?”

“Well, guess what. It is down to two people. Sometimes that’s the way it breaks. And it can be down to one person if you like.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You can go home any time you like.” Goddamn moron that I was.

“So you can hand over this thing with a clear conscience?”

“Oh, so you’re Jiminy fucking Cricket now. No. So I can just get the job done with the minimum amount of distraction and then go home myself. You may not have noticed, but I am not having fun here, Trix. This job started out weird and it’s gotten scary. I want it to be over now. Either I don’t find the book, in which case I’m going to assume this is the end of the line, or I find the book, in which case I hand it the hell over, get paid, go home, and forget the whole thing ever happened.”

She looked at me with narrowed eyes. “You want to forget it all happened.”

“Yeah,” I said, like a goddamn moron, “yeah, I do.”

“Uh-huh. You know, I was wondering how this’d start to go wrong. I didn’t really think it’d begin with me daring to have an opinion.”

“What?”

“You want to forget it all happened? That starts with me, Mike. Look at you. Did you even realize you stood up? Your chin sticking out like a sulky child? Your fists all balled up?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Sure you did. And, you know, if you really think handing over anything that could even possibly affect people’s minds to the bastard in the White House is a good idea—or if you care so little about people that you really don’t give a shit whether it’s a good idea or not—then maybe it’s just as well I’m getting a good look at you now. Give me the handheld.”

“What for?”

“I want to take some pictures and upload them to my photo-hosting site.”

Why the hell not. I took it out of my jacket and dropped it on the carpet by her.

“Do what you like, Trix. If you really, honestly think I was talking about us, when the whole conversation had been about the job…then fuck it. I’ll get my stuff and find a hotel. And you can do what you like. This is a stupid argument. You’re talking yourself around in circles and I just want to get done with this job that has scared the shit out of me and go back to some semblance of a life. With you, if you can get past the fact that it’s you I care about and not the endless parade of assholes, freaks, and crapsacks I meet every day. Without you, if you really believe my lack of love for the animal-humping community is a good enough reason to throw us away. I’m going out for a walk. You do what you like.”

Chapter 45

I walked for an hour before I realized I no longer remembered what I was so pissed about. By which point I was totally lost and had no idea how to get back to the house.

So I lit up a cigarette (and I knew I was smoking too much), slowed down, and just strolled for a while, to see where the broad sunlit streets led me. Every now and then I stopped at a corner and looked around for a cab, reminding myself each time that I wasn’t in New York and that this wasn’t a civilized city.

Occasionally, a private car would go by, and I’d see faces pressed to the windows, staring at me like I was an alien. It eventually hit me that I was the only pedestrian I’d seen the whole time I was pounding the sidewalk, and that I stood out like a cheerleader in Riker’s.

I just walked. After a while, houses gave way to low, broad industrial units. I stopped on a corner to light another cigarette, just because I really was in that kind of a mood. It took me a moment to register someone yelling at me. I was about to yell back that smoking was still allowed outdoors when I realized the guy doing the shouting, standing at the entrance to the nearest industrial building, was waving an unlit cigarette. He was stocky, midthirties, glasses, and a Star Wars T-shirt that looked like it’d been printed when the first one came out. He was scratching at his short brown hair like a little monkey that’d been kept in a cage too long. I wandered over.

“Please tell me you’ve got a light,” he said in a strangled voice. “My lighter died and I swear no one in the entire building smokes anymore.”

I flicked my lighter and cupped the flame for him. He sucked at his smoke like a dehydrated kid putting a straw to a lake. None of the smoke came back out of him, as if his body had just absorbed the entire load. “Thanks, man. I was dying. People always said these things would kill me.”

“No problem.”

He stuck out a stubby-fingered hand. “Zack. Zack Pickles.”

“Mike McGill.” I nodded at the building. “This your business?”

“Yep. Welcome to the Farm.” He had a goofy, childlike grin that made me kind of like him right off the bat.

“What kind of business?”

“Internet business. You?”

“I’m a private investigator.” I laughed as he instantly turned paler than ghost shit. “Relax. I’m not from around here, I’m already on a case, and I never heard of you. I’m staying with a friend of a friend… hell, somewhere back over there, I’m a little bit kind of totally fucking lost at this point. And it’s a lost property case. So, you know, go me. You can restart your heart now.”

“That obvious?”

“’Fraid so. Whatever your business is, I give you my word I couldn’t care less.”

He blew out a breath, sagging in his skin. “Jesus. This is why I don’t leave the server room. You’re from out of town?”

“Manhattan.” I struggled my wallet out and gave him one of my few remaining business cards. The ones that survived going around the washing machine six weeks earlier. “The trail led me here, though I don’t hold out a hell of a lot of hope. And, well, I think I just fucked things up with a girl, and I’m walking, and…”

“And here you are. Girls are nothing but trouble anyway. They are not like us.”

“This one especially. Trust me.”

He grinned. “You look like a man who could use a drink. And I never met a real live PI before. You want a beer?”

“That is the first sane thing I’ve heard all day.”

“C’mon. I’ll give you the ten-cent tour.”

We went into the building’s lobby, where I was blasted half to death by L.A.-style arctic air-conditioning. A sour-looking girl gave me a handwritten visitor’s badge on a lanyard stolen from an adult movie expo in 2001 at Zack’s request.

“So what do you farm here, Zack?”

“Money. Information. Also cum.”

Pushing through the big double doors at the end of the lobby, we entered a massive space filled with three-walled cubicles. I leaned around the missing wall of the first one. The cubicle had been made to look like a teenager’s bedroom. On the single bed was a young woman in schoolgirl gear and a headset preparing to do something disgusting and probably quite painful with a pink rubber dildo the size of my entire arm. There was a laptop on the bed next to her. Set in the doorway was a camera on a tripod, thick cables running out of it and chasing into the floor.

I looked at Zack. “The hell?”

He pointed ahead, smiling proudly. Every cubicle I looked in had a similar arrangement. Some of them replaced girls with boys. A few had boys dressed as girls. One had a woman in her late sixties. The only cubicle with two people in it featured a pair of Japanese girls doing something just frighteningly hideous with a bucket of baby eels. Every last one of them was performing sex acts in front of a dedicated camera.

We went through the next set of heavy double doors, into a corridor.

“What did I just see, Zack?”

“One part of my business. Cool, no?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I just saw.”

“Okay. You go to one of my Web sites. The Web site connects to the laptops in the cubes. The girl with the laptop performs to the camera. The camera connects to the Net. The video from the cam shoots down the Net to the Web site. You see the girl in the cube. The whole thing’s on a ten-second delay. The signal basically wraps around the world before it comes to your computer. Legal reasons, I’m not going into it. You pay for the video by credit card, I sanitize the sale in Russia, we’re all good.”

“But…Why so many? Jesus Christ, man, why the eels?”

Zack giggled. “Because everyone has a different kink, man. The more Web sites with unique content I provide, the more customers I get. Not everyone gets off on a softcore murder mystery on Skinemax, you know? And once the infrastructure was down, adding new sites was almost costless.”

“Kinda fringe-y, though, surely? I mean, girls with eels in their…Is there a lot of call for that?”

“Think of it as exploded television. Every station has at least one show you want to see, right? Well, on my network, your favorite show is on all the time. Everyone’s favorite show is on all the time, whenever you want to watch it. Add up all the viewers on my network, and I have a bigger audience than HBO. This ain’t fringe anymore, friend. If you define the mainstream as that which most people want to watch, then I’m as mainstream as it gets.”

“Exploded television.”

“Exactly. Exploded television. I am the ultra cable company. This is the way of the future. Anything you want, on a computer screen, whenever you want it, through a subscription or a micropayment of a few bucks through your credit card. That eel thing? For a buck a time you can download the day’s highlights to your iPod and watch it while you’re in the can. Huge in Japan. And it pays for all kinds of interesting stuff.”

“Whoa. Hold up.” I wanted a minute to catch up with this. “You’ve got like fifty people in wired-up video Internet sex boxes out there…and that’s not the whole thing?”

“It’s not even the whole of the cubicle farm. We’ve got another hundred people upstairs.”

“Yeah, I get that you have a porn army in here. But you’re leading me to believe that this isn’t all about you getting richer than God. Because if you’re not bullshitting me then you have got to be richer than God.”

Zack opened the nearest door and gestured for me to go in. “Oh, hell, yeah. I could buy Paris Hilton and sell her body to medical science while she was still alive if I wanted to. And, believe me, there are times I’ve considered it. In here.”

The door led only to a small gray cell with another door, much heavier, on the opposite wall. This one had a keypad lock. Zack made a sheepish face as he shielded the keypad with his body to input the number code that popped the door. And pop it did, with a hiss: hermetically sealed.

It opened on what I can only describe as Nerd Mission Control. Rows of desks with flat computer screens and keyboards, racks of machinery on the walls, cables carpeting the floor like a mass of snakes. Three guys and two girls who all looked like they popped out of the same pod as Zack, uniform in bad T-shirts and baggy jeans, sat among the screens, moving from desk to desk, tapping or mouse-clicking the occasional command.

“This,” said Zack with pride, “is what I’m talking about.”

“Looks like you could launch a space rocket from here.”

“Ha!” Zack liked that. “Elon Musk only wishes he had a setup this sweet.”

“Who?”

“The guy who sold PayPal to eBay for one point five billion. He used the money to create his own space-launch company.”

“A guy from the Internet has his own space rockets now?”

“Yeah, welcome to the late twentieth century there, Mike.”

“Funny. So if you’re not launching the next probe to Mars in here…”

Zack sat down at one of the workstations, calling up a window with a sweep of its mouse, peering intently at the string of numbers it coughed up for him. “Do you even know why people want to go to Mars? I don’t get it. There’s nothing there except probably some bacteria, if we go up to look at the bacteria then the bacteria we carry will kill it and therefore we’ve made life on Mars extinct, we can’t learn shit from the geology because the gravity isn’t the same and gravity commands geology and—”