44. The Tech #2
Between puffs on the synthtube, Jeff pointed at the paused video on the TV screen on the other side of the room, his eyes squinting.
“You see that there? Absolute cinema.” He coughed and unpaused the TV.
A younger man was looking at another, older man, who was facing away from him, through a small opening between tall chairs with people in cowboy hats, jeans, and leather vests.
Reflections played against the slot machines all around them in several rows.
A myriad of lights, mostly reds, greens, yellows. Lots of yellow.
The old guy didn’t realise he was being watched. A zoom-in brought us closer to the younger man, the look of a cop or detective. Behind him was an unfocused blur of light.
Jeff paused it again.
“See that? Cinema! C-I-N-E-M-A! This director, man, I’m telling you. You see this, doll?”
Dylan visibly recoiled. “Call me that again and I’ll break your hand.” She flashed a grin at Isaak, which Jeff didn’t notice. She was enjoying playing the baddie.
“Like he broke his, you mean?” A wild demeanour settled on Jeff as he started to test their limits again.
Dylan uncrossed her toned arms in another show of her strength. “Leave him alone.”
Isaak intervened. “It’s okay. Please, go on, Jeff.” He was used to Jeff’s stream of consciousness rants on the beauty of cinema and the genius of certain directors. Isaak knew he wouldn’t get to his point until he was done.
Jeff glanced at Dylan, a little worried, then looked back to Isaak.
“Where others would simply shoot the scene, this guy was like, ‘No! Let’s shoot it really slow.’ I mean, really slow.
Let the audience breathe in the scene! Breathe this whole scene in.
You see the cop? He’s a perv. And so is the old man.
But the old man is much worse than the cop.
The director is challenging the audience.
You want to pick a side and obviously you side with the cop, but actually he’s a pretty fucking shitty dude himself. ”
“And why would he do that?” Isaak was okay with letting this play out. In fact, he was worried Jeff would kick them out if they stopped his diatribe. Well, he’d try.
“Because he’s an artist. A damn good artist. He’s still around, you know.”
“I know. And only ’cause you tell me every time.”
Jeff took another puff on the synthtube, the cloud of smoke a mix of electric colours. “I wonder what he’s up to these days.”
“NWR?”
“Yeah, man. I would love to see some premium new piece of his. Go even slower this time.”
Isaak frowned. “Probably in a home by now. Isn’t he eighty-something?”
Jeff scowled and moved away from Isaak. “Don’t diss the Renn. Nigel Windermere Renn is one of the greatest directors ever! Who would ever put him in a home?!”
Isaak agreed, but his face betrayed his diminishing patience for these antics.
Jeff loved an audience. So every time Isaak came to him for help with something technical – and illegal – Jeff would see it as a chance to indulge his guest in some movie-watching, some mild theorisation on the meaning of certain flicks.
“Mind having a peek at his brain now?” Dylan said, raising her voice. Seeing her fully embody the role of the enforcer, the muscle, was doing something to him. He tried to hide the way he stared at her from Jeff. He definitely didn’t need to know.
“You guys are a pain in the ass,” Jeff huffed. “Come on.”
He took them to the other room in the flat.
What was supposed to be cramped bedroom had been turned into a hacker’s dream, an assortment of computers, chipboards, peripherals, VR headsets, and game controllers, all lining the walls in stacked rows.
You couldn’t tell if the wall was painted or wallpapered with all the hardware filling the space like tech sprayed from a garden hose.
Nostalgia for a past Jeff hadn’t even lived, just read about and watched on the tube archives.
In the middle of the room was a recliner chair, and next to it a smaller chair and a lowered black desk. There was a screen on the desk.
Isaak would have to tape in for the procedure. The reality of making himself defenceless in a room with Jeff raised his heartbeat. His eyes sought Dylan, who looked back at him calmly.
“If you do anything to him while he’s under,” she told Jeff, like she could read Isaak’s mind, “if he’s in pain in any way – then you’ll be in pain. Understood?”
Jeff glared at her like a cornered rat. “It should… It should be painless. Come on, lie down there, man.”
Part of him wondered if Jeff was even to be trusted at this point. This seemed like a giant gamble. But despite all of the gear at the car wash, Elo didn’t have the tech to peer into his tape strides herself. Not yet anyway, he corrected himself.
Jeff sat and shifted uncomfortably in the small chair by the black desk.
He placed his synthtube down, then grabbed a cassette tape from a tower next to the desk.
After inspecting it and making sure it was the right one, he loaded the cassette into a piece of overly complicated machinery that sat on the desk.
The miniaturisation of the CPU had little impact on Jeff’s workmanship.
Next, he held up a blue roll of tape, glossy and thick.
“Slap this on.”
“Won’t taping in erase my previous records or something? I thought this was gonna be a VR-type deal, a brain scanner dance of some kind?”
Jeff smacked his lips. “Just stick it on. Let me worry about the scrying.”
Isaak’s heart beat faster. He shot another glance at Dylan, who stood with her arms crossed over her chest. She nodded, leaning into the role she’d created for herself here.
“Before you do that, champ, explain what’s going to happen to him, and why Elodie sent us here instead of doing it herself.”
“Ah… sure.” Jeff was getting used to having to justify himself to Dylan.
“This machine is very new. I built it based on her research into the chemistry and science of the tape. The small percentages she’s been able to crack.
Encoded in these proteins left behind in your blood are the photograms from your eyeballs.
The tape makes these, in whatever way the tape works.
This thing can grab them before you sweat them away in a few days’ time.
We’ll be able to accompany his trip on this screen.
So you see how it’s not safe for me to go out there with this under my arm, or for other people to even know about it, right?
” He smacked his lips. “Can I do my job now?”
She acquiesced.
Isaak sat in the chair, not in any way reassured by the explanation. He carefully peeled a bit of the blue tape, and ripped it off the roll with some effort. It was thick, like builder’s tape.
Dylan leaned down and planted a kiss on his lips, catching him by surprise. He gave her a smile. Anxiety gripped him, but he knew he had to do this if they we going to find the warehouse and hopefully save Talia. He’d wracked his brains for hours, and knew he couldn’t do this on his own.
Jeff looked unfazed, either because he didn’t care or because he didn’t want to incur any more of Dylan’s wrath.
Isaak put the tape to his right temple, head leaning back on the recliner chair, legs raised up on the footrest.
For a moment there was peace, empty blackness.
But soon the Tapeworld’s kaleidoscopic blur of colours appeared.
He was inside a tape-tube, rather than in his tape-space or the Boulevard.
A familiar low hum emanated from the walls of the tube.
Isaak reached out for the wall automatically, the light and shapes sliding through his fingers, the sensation wet.
He walked deeper into the tube, moving slowly, anxious about what might be waiting for him.
He exited the tube at the other end, half expecting to be in another trapworld from Astrid, but no. It was a blank white space, only his chair replicated in the middle of it.
“Okay. The screen will show what we find.” Jeff’s voice startled him, coming in like an ominous god.
“What screen?”
A blast of light and colour invaded the pure white room, like an ethereal ultra-high-definition cinema.
“That screen.”
All the bright lights made Isaak’s eyes hurt.
The screen showed his point of view, like a bodycam in a police brutality incident. It was already trained on Cardinal Row, the warehouse and the beds loaded with people, the Crypterra Sleepers strapped to their heads.
“Whoa, whoa, what is this? What have you been doing, man?” Jeff’s surfer-like demeanour made for a very jarring ominous god. “Did you do something naughty to these sleeping people?”
Was the only thing on this guy’s mind sex? “No, just… Stop.”
Jeff chuckled. “Make me!”
Figures. Sex and being a fucking wanker.
Isaak’s POV walked forward then turned. Two grey shapes attacked him, and he struck one with the sword-pistol. The other one he sliced and shot, Gunkatana in hand. The shapes writhed on the floor.
“Dude… That’s some serious hardware. You kicked their asses… What are they? Bots? And what’s that sword, man? A laserpistol?”
Isaak didn’t want Jeff to know anything, not even the weapon’s name, but he was already finding out too much.
The replay of his fight continued. Then the screen showed Astrid threatening Talia.
“Ow, don’t hit me!” Jeff said. “Okay, okay, I paused it.”
Isaak couldn’t hear Dylan’s side of the conversation, but he didn’t need to. The screen was paused on a shot of Talia, barely conscious, wrapped in the glass cage filled with water.
“Hey… You can lean next to me speak… Okay, take it!”
There was silence for a few seconds.
“That’s what you saw?” Dylan said into the space around him, having commandeered the controls. “She’s bound and being drowned? Fucking hell, Isaak!”
“I tried to spare you the details. Sorry. But we know Astrid is keeping her alive. She’d be without a pulse by now if she wasn’t.”
Silence again.
He really wished she hadn’t had to see her best friend drowning in the Tapeworld. Had holding that back from her been the wrong decision?