air re-circulation system that served the Little Tokyo arcology. Jonny removed the loose bottom panel from the vent and he and Ricos crawled inside, careful not to get their new clothes dirty. The dimensions of the vent were such that they were able to duck-walk their way to an access hatch, a hundred meters or so upwind from where they entered. It was like strolling into a tornado the whole way.
Manipulating the lock from the inside, Jonny opened the hatch and they jumped down to the floor of the re- circulation plant. The place was fully automated, Jonny remembered, the human crew making no more than a cursory round of the place once or twice a night. Jonny could hear Ricos behind him, breathing above the din of the air-circulators. The man was tense and jittery, starting at every grunt and hiss of the equipment. Jonny led him into a corridor that rose in a slow spiral toward the surface. Cinder block walls painted the teal and orange of the Hundred Dynasty Corporation bulged with rot.
They found the ladder Jonny was looking for behind a wall of fifty-five gallon drums stacked on modular racks, pushed away a grating at the top and emerged behind a French discotheque, La Poupee.
In the pastel half-light that bled over the rooftops, the skeletal superstructures supporting neon graphics and holo-projectors, Jonny took a last quick look at the dead man's ID. Jonny was Christian van Noorden, a Dutch-born systems analyst for Pemex-U.S.; Ricos had a chip identifying him as Eduardo Florentino, a security coordinator for Krupp Bio-Elektronisches. Jonny slipped on his mirrored aviators and headed for the boulevard, Ricos on his heels, and merged unnoticed into the crowd of strolling tourists, the cream of the multinationals' crop.
Walking just ahead of Jonny and Ricos was a group of young Swedish aerospace techs. They were fair and slender, strikingly attractive, each with the same narrow jaw and delicate, long-fingered hands. Jonny wondered if they might be clones. They were all shirtless and the hard muscles of their torsos were exposed, flexing as they moved, beneath transparent polycarbonate bodysheaths.
Their muscles had been dyeddifferent colors to accentuate the movement of various groups. They were like living anatomy charts.
Across the street, high in the air, appeared the parting lips of a hologram vagina, a pink, idealized orchid, a toothless mouth that seemed to engulf the image, becoming a roller coaster flesh-tunnel, the glistening walls blurring by.
At the corner, Jonny had to stop. He pretended to watch the animated menu display outside a Burmese restaurant. The menu explained the meals in different languages depending on where you stood, but Jonny hardly noticed it. His hands were shaking.
It was an impossible psychic leap. He was a kid again, seeing Little Tokyo for the first time, nailed in his tracks by the light, the air, the impossible wealth and beauty of the place, the blatant and cherished waste of energy. Little Tokyo was a transcultural phenomenon, its name having long since been rendered meaningless, indicating a city geosector and giving hints to the place's history, but little else. It was Japanese and European chic filtered through American sleaze, through generations of exported television, video and Link images, visions of Hollywood and Las Vegas, the cheap gangster dreams of the Good Life, haven and playground for the privileged employees of the multinationals. Little Tokyo was loud and it cost the corporations dearly, but they loved it and, in the end, came to need it. What had once been their plaything, now defined them.
There were clubs offering all varieties of sexual encounters, death-fetish clubs, where controlled doses of euphoria-inducing poisons had replaced drugs as the high of choice (It was in one of these clubs when he was seventeen that Jonny had first tried Mad Love. Right now, he thought, he would kill for a hit.). There were the computer-simulation clubs, offering those with skull-plugs close encounters with violence, madness and death. A block ahead was the Onnogata where members of various cartels gambled time in the re-generation tanks for data on next year's computers, synth-fuels and pharmaceuticals.
Other clubs offered similar opportunities, and anyone could play. Hit a losing streak, and you could leave parts of your body scattered all over the boulevard. Organ removal and installation were all part of the standard hotel services. Those who lost badly enough were put on life-support systems, sometimes gambling even those away before the company jet could arrive to take them home. No one had died in Little Tokyo for over a century. Not permanently.
Ricos was staring at Jonny. 'You want to eat now?' he asked.
Jonny looked at the man, then back at the menu which was describing a chicken and rice dish in over-eager French. 'No,' he said, 'just thinking.'
He took off across the clean broad street, walking, wanting to get the feel of the place before he got down to business. He had not been Little Tokyo in years. Warm breezes carried the faint smell of orange blossoms, a wholly contrived sensation. Jonny had seen drums full of the scent back in the re-circulation plant.
'Conover had been right about the eyes,' Jonny noticed. Half-consciously, he had begun to manipulate them, changing their focus at first by mistake, then by repeating the mistake until he could control it. He turned to Ricos, who seemed unaffected by the place, colors slurring slightly off-register in his peripheral vision. 'You see it?' asked Jonny.
'Que es, maricon?'
'No one's sick here. No one's old,' he said. They were walking by a man-made lake. One and two-person robot hover-vehicles were cutting up the glassy surface of the water, shuttling between the shore and a five-story pagoda on a small island near the lake's center, wings of jewel-like foam spreading from beneath the little disc- shaped crafts, setting off the tailored evening gowns and tuxes of the riders. 'Not a leper, not a liver spot, not a paper cut in sight.'
'Si,' Ricos replied, nodding toward a young couple displaying their customized genitalia to some friends. Chrome winked from between their thighs. 'Estos carajoes, they come in kits. Comprende? Cut 'em, they don' bleed.'
The entrance to the Japanese club was flanked by two man-sized temple dogs carved from some dark supple wood. Ricos walked past the place, but Jonny stopped, drawn by something, perhaps the odd angle at which one dog's head had been craved, realizing at the moment he stopped that the dogs were not statues but were, in fact, alive. The dogs, pure-bred Tosas, sat on their haunches, watching the crowd with the impassiveness of sunning lizards, the pink of a tongue appearing now and then to lick massive jaws, their necks and backs bulging with muscle, the end-product of controlled breeding and genetic manipulation. As Jonny looked at the animals, a frozen image of the bodysheathed Swedes imposed itself on his vision, the street by La Poupee clear in the background. Then it was gone. Jonny blinked, tensing the muscles around his eyes. The image of the Swedes flashed back. He held it this time, made it move slowly, forward and backward. It made perfect sense that the eyes would have a recording chip, he thought. Couple of days ago, they were part of a security system. Download pictures of intruders for the law. He blinked off the image and said, 'In here,' to Ricos.
The uniformed Japanese doorman bowed and held the door for them as they went in, touching a hand to his right temple as Jonny and Ricos walked past. Scanning for weapons, Jonny knew. He cursed silently, wondering if they had been made already.
Inside the club, it was very dark, the architecture traditional: tatami mats, low tables glowing with buttery yellow light of painted lanterns, white-faced geishas serving pots of hot sake to the mostly male, mostly Japanese and American middle-management crowd.
There was a lot of noise coming from a room beyond the bar. Jonny slipped his hand to the small of his back as if to hitch up his pants, and touched the grip of a small SIG Sauer handgun. The body of the weapon was of a liquid crystal polymer, impossible, he had been told, to pick up on metal detectors. The shells were a Gobernacion standard issue, commonly known as Rock Shot. Each bullet had a synthetic quartz tip. When it struck an object and compressed, the minute charge from the quartz was conducted through a medium of liquid polypyrrole where it ignited suspended particles of C-4 plastique. Ricos was carrying a similar weapon in his jacket.
Jonny ordered sake and motioned for the geisha to bring it to them in the next room. She bowed. He smiled uncomfortably at her, unsure if he was supposed to bow back or not. He bowed, and the geisha giggled at his gaijin stiffness. 'Keep your eyes open for Easy Money,' he told Ricos.
They split up in the next room, climbing opposite sides of a flat-topped pyramid constructed of multiple tiers of polished mahogany beams. The smell of sweat and blood was heavy in the smoky booze-air, but Jonny was still shocked by what he saw when he reached the top tier, pushed his way to the front and peered down into the wooden pen.
The winning dog was just receiving its award (outline of a golden lotus on a small banner of purple satin) from a pale doughy-faced man in shirt sleeves. One of the dog's front paws was twisted and badly mangled. Jonny
