Flashback

He’d wanted to kill Sato before this. Now he vowed to torture the Jap before he killed him.

LoDo was the cute name developers back in the 1980s—or maybe the ’70s—gave to the old Lower Downtown warehouse district of Denver that squatted between the real downtown and the South Platte River. In the 1800s the area had been the site for whorehouses, saloons, saddleries, warehouses, and more saloons. By the middle of the 1900s even the saloons and whorehouses had gone out of business, leaving one saddle-seller, a few working warehouses, a lot of empty warehouses, and hundreds upon hundreds of winos, drug addicts, and street people. In the last decades of the twentieth century, urban renewal—and the city revitalizing itself toward the river—had chased the winos and addicts out to be replaced by upscale eateries and even more upscale condos with brick walls and exposed rafters. By the time the classic-looking Coors Field ballpark opened in 1995, LoDo was in full resurgence. It didn’t begin its decline until after It All Hit The Fan, but by the Year of Clear Vision, LoDo was well on its way to its current state of boasting mostly whorehouses, a few saloons, abandoned condos haunted by flashback and other addicts, whorehouses, and more whorehouses.

Keigo Nakamura had died in a room on the third floor of a three-story building on Wazee Street, a long dark street with two-story whorehouses, saloons, and warehouses on one side and three-story warehouses, saloons, and whorehouses on the other side.

It was full light—or at least as light as it was going to get on this chilly, rainy September morning—when Sato parked the Honda at the curb outside the three-story building that looked exactly like all the other three-story buildings on the south side of Wazee Street. As the security chief came around to unlock the cuffs, Nick considered jumping Sato… then rejected the idea. He was too worn out by the night of flashing, the injections of T4B2T and TruTel, and from the sheer adrenaline of terror.

It would have to be another time.

Sato unlocked the cuffs and, seizing both of Nick’s bleeding wrists in one gigantic hand, pulled an aerosol can from his suit pocket.

Mace! thought Nick and squeezed his eyes shut.

Sato sprayed something cold onto Nick’s lacerated wrists. For a few seconds the pain was so terrible that Nick gasped loudly despite himself. Then… nothing. No pain at all. When Sato released his grip, Nick flexed his fingers. Everything worked fine and despite all the blood on his sweatshirt and the dash and windshield, the lacerations were superficial.

Sato grabbed Nick under the arm, lifted him out of the car, and plopped him down on the curb, steering him toward the old building. Shapes—sleeping flash addicts or winos, Nick assumed—stirred and stood in the dark entrance under the overhang.

Two men stepped out of the shadows but they weren’t winos or addicts. They were well-dressed young Japanese men. Sato nodded to them and one of the athletic-looking young men unlocked the double lock on the door.

“Coming to the crime scene six years after the crime,” said Nick, his voice shaking slightly from the cold and from the roil of fury inside him. “You think seeing this empty building after all this time is going to tell me anything?”

Sato’s only reply was to switch on the lights.

Nick had been to this crime-scene building numerous times five years and eleven months ago, even though he hadn’t been the responding homicide detective first on the scene, and he remembered the totally trashed mess of a site it was: three large rooms filled with couches and chairs and screens and a small kitchen on the first floor, furniture turned over everywhere, flashback vials crushed underfoot, lamps broken in the stampede of the witnesses to get out before the cops arrived that night, even wads of dirty clothing and the occasional used condom in corners.

No longer.

The furniture had been repaired and returned, the lamps were back in place and working, and although every surface was cluttered with dishes and glasses—a huge buffet had been set out down here on the first floor that night as a movie wrap party for Keigo’s Japanese assistants, the interview subjects, and others involved in his documentary film—all three rooms and the kitchen were now clean and in a fairly orderly early-party-stage clutter again.

“I don’t get it,” said Nick.

Sato handed him a pair of stylish wrap-around tactical glasses.

Even before activating them, Nick noticed how tremendously light they were. The DPD tactical glasses had always seemed to weigh a pound or more and gave their users headaches after ten minutes. Not these glasses. They were as light as regular sunglasses and, being wrap-around, filled his entire field of vision. The DPD glasses had always been an island of virtual sight with a vertigo-inducing reality seeping in all around.

Nick touched the icon on the glasses’ stem and just barely caught himself from exclaiming aloud. He took a few steps to confirm what he now saw.

All three party rooms and the kitchen were suddenly filled with people frozen in mid-stride, mid-conversation, mid-munch, mid-laugh, mid-flirt, and mid-flashback-inhalation. Real faces, real bodies. Real people.

He’d expected the figures to be there—it was what tac-glasses did—but he hadn’t expected this level of reality. The DPD and American military tactical glasses he’d used generated little more than wire-frame stick people with cartoonish and barely recognizable faces floating above the armature bodies like Halloween masks on a stick.

These were real people. The quality of 3D digital rendering was on the level of virtual movies or TV series being streamed these days, including the popular Casablanca series starring Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, Ingrid Bergman, and such constant new guest stars as nineteen- year-old Lauren Bacall. And after a while on that series, Nick knew from his late-night viewings, it didn’t seem at all strange to have other guest stars from different eras such as Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kathleen Turner, Galen Watts, Byron Bezukhov, Sheba Tits, or even all-virt stars such as Natasha Lyubof or Tadanobu Takeshi on the show. They were all equally real.

As real as the people suddenly filling this space and the adjoining rooms.

He took the tac-glasses off and paced through the rooms that circled the central open staircase. Sato followed. The rooms were now empty of anyone but Sato and him. He put the glasses back on and felt the inevitable jolt of vertigo as more than two hundred people reappeared.

Walking closer and inspecting the face of the first witness and interview subject he’d recognized, the former Israeli poet Danny Oz—pores were visible on the haggard man’s face and Nick could see the burst capillaries in Oz’s eyes and nose—he said, “This must have cost Mr. Nakamura a fucking fortune.”

Sato didn’t find that comment worth responding to.

“All three floors virtualized like this?” asked Nick, moving around the room looking closely at the unblinking men and women. He paused to stare down the low bodice of a young blond woman he didn’t recognize, perhaps one of the hookers hired for the party.

“Of course,” said Sato.

Nick looked up at the security chief. Sato didn’t appear any more or less three-dimensional, solid, or real than the other men and women and transvestites and gender-benders in the crowded room. Just broader and thicker than anyone else. Also, Sato was no longer the only Jap in the room. Besides two very young men and a young woman whom Nick recognized as being part of Keigo Nakamura’s video and sound crew, there were three well- dressed bodyguards, also wearing tactical glasses.

Why would they be wearing tac-glasses? wondered Nick but set the question aside for now. His head hurt.

At first, out of practice with tactical and having never practiced with this quality of tactical, Nick made the rookie’s mistake of stepping around and squeezing between the human forms in the crowded room. Then he shook his head ruefully and began walking through them to get where he was headed. The solid-looking three-dimensional digital maquettes didn’t object.

In one corner, a stocky, handsome, sandy-haired former Google exec wearing saffron robes was explaining the karmic glories of Total Immersion to five or six rapt young people. Nick remembered the guy—Derek Somebody. He’d been on Sato’s Top 18 list of witness-suspects yesterday morning… but Nick hadn’t been paying much