Ghosts of Punktown (13 page)

     He thanked God that at least this time her eyes were closed.

     “What did they do to you?” Lawr whispered. “Oh my God...what did they do?”

     Starve her? For how long? Or infect her, unintentionally or even willingly, with a deadly STD? He now noticed more bruises scattered upon her body, and he found himself wagging his head. He found himself hugging his chest, as she did.

     He was afraid, and he was angry. This pollution was into his comp’s memory now, and he might never scrub it out on his own. Feeling sickened, almost light
-headed, he lurched toward his computer and dropped into his chair, pawed at the keyboard. He returned to the site where he had inadvertently downloaded the imp. There, he went into the information regarding his new account, and found a link for help questions and technical support. There was no live contact for him to call, but there was a feature that enabled him to send a message. He typed one between glances at the girl in his bed. He was terrified at the idea of looking over his shoulder to discover her propped up, the eyes in those black sockets staring at him – maybe accusingly, as if he had something to do with her suffering – but she remained in her fetal position.

     He wrote,
“Last night I accidentally downloaded a holographic program called, I guess, SHE’S AN ANGEL from your site. I had no idea that your site featured such filth, and I’m outraged. Please tell me...”

     He paused. Tell him what? How to rid himself of the imp? Well, these things vanished on their own after a time, didn’t they? So tell him what – how long that would take? How to cleanse his comp’s memory of every trace of the program? After another glance at the trembling, cadaverous body in his bed, he resumed typing.

    
“Please tell me when this thing was recorded. The model in this program is in a very dangerous state.”

     As if she might still be rescued in time. Even if this had been recorded a week ago,
days ago
, wouldn’t the girl already be dead by now if her situation hadn’t changed? She looked on the verge of death already. Who was he kidding? He was looking at a corpse. She...

     SHE’S AN ANGEL. Oh...yes. So very funny, a joke maybe, but it sent a cold ripple up and down his back on centipede legs. Now he understood the words that had appeared on his screen.

     He went on,
“This should be called to the attention of the authorities. This is not titillation – this stuff portrays a horrific crime.”

     Not titillating? Well, someone had thought so. The person, or people, who had created the program, if no one else.

     Lawr finished,
“Do the forcers know who this girl is? What happened to her?”

     But why was he asking these people? Shouldn’t he be contacting the forcers themselves, to call their attention to this nightmare – assuming they weren’t already aware of it from earlier complaints?

     Ha. Yes, sure, call the forcers. He could invite them up to his flat and introduce them to the girl dying virtually in his bed. After which they could introduce him to a nice cell in the nearest precinct house.

     Almost absentmindedly he sent his message, then rose from his chair to regard the imp again. Despite the fact that this girl surely had to be dead – perhaps even months or
years
dead – he felt a mounting urgency, a growing desperation. He tried to reassure himself that the people who had done this might already have been caught and punished. The girl might already be long buried or cremated. Dare he hope that she might even have been released by her captors before she could succumb, their fun finished? Might she be recovering in a hospital now, or even safely at home with loving parents?

     SHE’S AN ANGEL.

     No...no, she was dead, that was a fact. His houseguest was a ghost. But even if her body had been found, it could be that her murderers had never been apprehended. What if the forcers had never heard about this download? Might there even be clues about the perpetrators accidentally captured in the recording? A reflection of a face in her pupils – in the earlier sections before her torture had begun, when her gentle eyes had still been open – if one could magnify the image enough? Was there anything he himself could do to study the recording, with the discovery of evidence in mind?

     He felt so...impotent. An anonymous message to the forcers; couldn’t he do that much, at least?

     Outside his windows, the sun was struggling to rise beyond the oppressive, massed towers of Punktown’s cityscape. Lawr hurried to pick up the remote that tinted his windows black, lest some voyeur in an apartment across the street peek into his flat. The city was full of lustful, furtive creatures, wasn’t it?

     How could he think of going to work today, even if the imp disappeared before he left for the office? He was in no condition for it; he’d vibrate in his chair until he exploded across the walls of his tiny cell of a cubicle. No, he’d call in sick. They wouldn’t like it, but at this point he didn’t care.

     He felt like a man who had awoken to find a living, breathing kidnap victim left on his hands. As if he himself shared complicity in such a crime.

     He regarded the girl again, wagged his head again, and muttered to her, “What am I supposed to do, huh? What am I supposed to do about you?”

     He made a sandwich and coffee for a quick breakfast, eating it around the corner of his kitchen as if self-conscious about viewing her starved body while he fed his own meaty form. When enough time had elapsed he made the call to his workplace, uncomfortable about his team leader seeing his image on her own screen, the green imp only feet away from him, just out of her range of sight. His team leader didn’t seem too irritated, after all, so he was grateful for small mercies. As he signed off he saw that a new text message had come in, and immediately he recognized its source as the porn site he had joined, in reply to his own message of only two hours ago. So early? But then, perhaps they were in another time zone, if not on another colony world altogether. Whatever the case, he began to read the words that had come from some anonymous customer support tech.

    
“Hello. In response to your message, we’re sorry that you were surprised to have downloaded the program in question. In the future, you will note that there is a tiny icon in the lower left corner of every interactive holograph link, should you wish to avoid any further accidental downloads. As for the subject matter of the download, sir, one can’t help but ask if you ‘accidentally’ joined our site, as well, without having any idea of the kind of content Incestykes offers to its subscribers...”

     “You sarcastic bastard,” Lawr said aloud, blood rising to his face.

    
“As for the individual in question, I have no information to offer about the outcome of the situation featured in the recording, or her present condition or whereabouts. Our still images and recordings come from countless sources, and we are not on a first name basis with them. We are offered content, we pay for it, and we post it. All we ask is that they confirm that the subjects involved are above the age of legal consent...”

    
“They lie,” Lawr said. “And you’re lying, too. You know she isn’t...you
know
.”
And age of consent or not, the girl was
dying
. Would they claim they took that to be fake? Or murder with the girl’s own consent, her willing participation, perhaps? That the child had filmed her own suicide by starvation, and pummeled herself for good measure?

     “I will tell you, sir, that though this might not be ‘titillation’ in your eyes, it happens to be one of our site’s most popular downloads...”

     “God,” Lawr whispered.

    
“But if it’s of any comfort to you, the program will end on its own after its fourth phase...”

    
Fourth?
Lawr thought. He stole a nervous peek at his quivering roommate.

    
“And sir, it might be rude of me to ask you this, but I can’t help but be curious. Are you new to Punktown?”

     “Fuck you,” Lawr snapped, shaking all over as he stabbed a finger into the key that closed the text message.

*     *     *

     Lawr didn’t own a car and thus rode the blue line to another neighborhood, to use a public vidphone that would be distant from his home. The tube was crowded and he was pressed close to one of its entrances, standing up and gripping a metal pole. A short, curvy black woman with thick reddish braids stood chatting with a friend in front of him, and as the tube swerved and swayed along its route her body repeatedly tilted so that her back pressed into his knuckles where they gripped the shaft. Then for a prolonged period she remained leaning back against his fist. Surely she knew it was a hand, his hand, indenting her soft flesh. He wondered if she might be savoring the human contact as much as he did, if only unconsciously. She got out one stop ahead of his, never glancing back, and his heart rolled over with sickening longing as if the love of his life had just abandoned him. He realized, in a stunned kind of way, that he was even on the verge of tears. Then the doors hissed shut, and the tube plunged back into darkness.

     He reached his stop, at street level purchased a coffee at a ubiquitous chain, sipped it as he made his way to the public phone he had recalled could be found here. In its clear plastic booth, the thicket of graffiti on its walls affording him further shelter, he wrapped his finger in a napkin like a bandage so as not to leave prints on the keyboard.

     Back at home he had found the call number for the Paxton Police Force’s anonymous tip hotline. The information at the PPF’s public site had assured him that the call would not be traced, but he wasn’t so sure of that. Supposedly his voice would be distorted, and no vid transmission would be received on their end. He hesitated, his finger poised over the keys. Could he believe them? They wouldn’t dare lie about their methods, would they? Was he really willing to take that chance? And for what – to rescue a dead girl?

     He stalled by sipping his coffee, and watching pedestrians through clear spots in the booth’s painted walls, feeling removed in his observation as if he were peeking at them on a screen. A Choom woman in a smart business suit clacked by on shiny heels, her skirt taut and without wrinkles, her legs almost unnaturally shapely and smooth in their hose, like the legs of a mannequin. Her ear-to-ear lips were painted a metallic blue to match her tie, her face like porcelain with either skin treatments or makeup or both. It seemed to Lawr sometimes that people wanted to make themselves look less – or more – than real.

     There were men who would lean into their monitors with smiles on their faces, crawling desire in their guts, to see that very woman lying with her skirt hitched up and the hose torn away and her throat gaping as wide as her amphibious mouth. There were men who would not only want to see it, but want to perform it. This megalopolis was filled with such
men. One could populate a lesser city entirely with them alone. They didn’t see the woman as a living, breathing person like themselves. She was as good as a comp construct to them, or an android, a character in a vidgame. They were ravenous boys – whatever their age – who wanted to break things and glut themselves and wait for more and more stimulation to come along and relieve them of the boredom and pointlessness that defined their existence. They were sharks; all teeth, no souls. In Punktown, maybe the only souls in residence were those one downloaded into one’s flat, temporary souls that lasted mere hours instead for eternity.

     The tiniest, barest of clicks inside him. Lawr set his cup on a little shelf, turned to the keyboard and punched in the number with his mummified finger.

     The seal for the Paxton Police Force filled the scratched, partially graffiti-obscured vidscreen, but that was all. A young woman’s voice came over the speaker. “Paxton Police Force tip hotline – your anonymity is assured. How can we help you?”