ZERO SUM GAME

Rotovilla was the kind of city that, if a psychologist were to make a profile of it, would be a terminal psychotic, slowly degenerating into an angry red mass of chaos and depravity. The ebb and flow of the Biz, the primordial market economy, was like a lead ball being shot out of a cannon on Jupiter - it went up fast, but came down faster. In other words, the name of the game was zero-sum, and nobody knew that better than Dystopia Joe, private eye, substance abuser, and longtime debtor to more loan sharks than a successful politician had lies.

He poured himself a shot of '75 on the rocks and canted his trusty black fedora over his eyes, putting his feet up on the desk as Crazy Akhmed pounded on the door, demanding his three months unpaid rent. Outside the crusting, yellowed Venetians a video billboard depicted an ad for designer clothes, flickering epileptically in pastel and neon, lighting up the perpetual night with its kaleidoscopic effervescence.

When the Biz waxed and waned, it took people along with the riptide. Ride it right and the world will be your oyster, ride it wrong and you'll go down in the crush. Joe had ridden high and fast a few weeks ago, but now he was a goner who needed more replacement organs than a zombie in a slaughterhouse.

He'd had it big with the other case, he'd even had a girl and all the drugs and black market chemwashing that he could ask for, whereas now he was waiting for the off chance that the phone would ring to give him a case spying for anxious lovers for a few credits apiece.

The vidphone chirruped twice, and Dystopia Joe answered.

The face that appeared was shrouded in shadow, as was the custom, but apparently had forgot the requisite voice-modulation, so whoever it was spoke in his natural, rather hurried, gravel tone.

"Are you that detective, Dystopia Joe?"

"Yeah. Lemme guess - you're suspicious about your wife and you want me to check out why she's been 'working late', right? Listen, I don’t do-"

"Not really. You up for a kill?"

"Sorry, you got the wrong number, pal. I'm a private dick, not a hired gun."

"What if I threw in a bod-job along with twice the going rate?"

Now this was something! You could almost hear the detective's ears pricking up. Not so much the money - money was like water in your hands - but the organ deal. Chop-shop upgrades were expensive, and he needed one, badly.

Artificial organs were the lifeblood of the Biz in Rotovilla, for guts and sheer human endurance could only take you so far; given Rotovilla's filth-ridden, disease-strewn, toxic mess, inhaling the vapours given off by the Greater Sludge Sea upon whose shores the megacity was perched, it was a wonder that anyone could live there at all. The invention of the vat-grown human organ coupled with advanced cybernetics hailed a new era in disposability - now bodies were as easily thrown away as everything else, as long as you had enough money to do it. Joe didn't.

"Yeah. Maybe."

"Meet me at twelve in the MetroAx railbus terminal Downtown. You know that place?"

"Sure."

The viewer turned transparent as the image winked off the vid. Akhmed was making some sort of ultimatum to him through the door, and despite the translucent glass, it was clear that he was holding something big and painful-looking. Like a cudgel, possibly a samurai sword. Dystopia Joe decided it would be more prudent to leave through the fire escape.

He grabbed his needle gun, his battered beige trenchcoat, and his hip flask of scotch. He pushed up the window, releasing a white shower of plaster and peeling paint, and clambered down the iron grating that shed flakes of rust as his hard shoes ground carefully over them.

**

Rotovilla was a city of eternal twilight. Imagine a cave of twisted steel and lurid advertisements, of ferrocrete and plastic, ascending forever vertically into the building shadow and neon night. Imagine if someone had taken the Los Angeles Sprawl, mixed it with the erect artificiality of New York, lit by the glow of Tokyo and the buzz of Hong Kong, and thrown in a good dash of Mexico City pollution and poverty for good measure. Now magnify it a thousand times over till you've got an ugly orange-brown-black mess the size of a decent mountain range, put it next to a storm-tossed inland ocean of toxic waste, and spin up the tempo of city life like you're a hyperactive DJ on crack. That's Rotovilla.

The lower levels  were encased in permanent darkness, the skyscrapers stretching for kilometers into the sky, the light of the sun robbed by an endless network of girders, supports, wires and aerial catwalks. Attached to the side of every level of the valley of skyscrapers were catwalks and platforms, with aerial bridges extending across the gulf between buildings, like a petrified forest of steel trees.

It was raining that night in Rotovilla; it often rained in Rotovilla.

The collective exhalations of eight hundred million people and the labyrinthine masses of their vehicles and factories gathered in the cold darkness and trickled down, acidic and yellow as urine, running in oily rivulets over the mottled asphalt. Dystopia Joe turned up his collar against the damp and crammed his fedora tighter down on his head.

A subvertisement blimp drifted lazily by, upon its inflatable sides were flickering, hypnagogic images lighting up the night as searching subneural impulse beams telepathically broadcasted its message of "Buy, buy, BUY!"

All of it faded vaguely into a red, subliminal blur of shadows and light, a hectic, almost palpable nervous energy that bored angrily through your eyeballs and out your ears, like some subsonic buzz. The buzz of the Biz, busily bustling. Joe found himself hustling, and sat down at the nearest MetroAx station to wait for the railbus.

The MetroAxial Transit Rail was a decrepit, self-sustaining system of public transportation run by a system of AIs which half the time you couldn't tell whether they were running, offline, or on methamphetamines. MetroAx had been dreamt up by some long-dead company that thought it could make a reliable system of transportation in a city that had defied mapmakers until the mapmakers gave up.

At one time, it might've even worked, but nowadays it served nobody but those who were too down and out to afford their own vehicles, and those who had nowhere to travel and rode it for movement's sake. As such, it made the perfect mode of travel for people who didn't want to be seen, like Dystopia Joe.

In the musty, jostling MetroAx car, Joe bore the thin carpeting the colour of vomit and the flickering glow of run-down fluorescents in silence, staring quietly out the windows at the flashes of light and colour as the world passed swiftly by; the ghosts of a neon dream howling past in gloom and darkness.

The subway terminal was a high-ceilinged lobby that looked more like an immense parking lot, and probably had been at one time. There was a constant breeze from all directions as the automated trains came and went, so that the diseased refuse of a thousand years of wastefulness never ceased their fluttering, never finding peace in mouldering on the oil-splotched concrete floor; silently suffering paper ghosts.

Joe took a shot from his trusty flask of moonshine.

Tall concrete columns ascended into the ceiling of the terminal, and a concourse ran around the second level. On the columns were mounted large screens, long dead and grey. From behind one of these columns a man appeared, dressed in a black rain coat and a battered hat.

"Glad you could make it. You're late."

"AI's, you know. Whatcha got for me, man? And do you have to stay in the shadows like that? You're making me nervous."

"Yes, I do. It's like a rule. I've got something for you."

The man in black fiddled around in his pocket a moment and withdrew a small, metallic object, which he causally tossed to Joe as he began pacing back and forth. Joe caught it and examined the thing. A rectangle with rounded corners and a small bulge at one end.

"Quantum cortex bomb. Implanted in the dura matter, just under the skull. They're covered with a silicon-carbide ersatz phospholipid, so they mask like regular cybernetics. Virtually untraceable."

"Scary shit. What poor fool did you jack up with this?"

A hologram, glowing green, appeared, slowly rotating in the air. It depicted a craggy, angular face, bristling with a thick, black beard, and a strong nose.

"He's got eight of them in him. Combined, it's a ten kiloton explosion."

"Nice."

"They're triggered by a set of codes. He knows half and I have the other. Just in case of-" he coughed "- some, uh, mission failure."

There was a silence as the man lit a cigarette and Joe took a swig from his hip flask. The stuff was like fire going down, and like fire, didn't want to stay down. The man in black continued.

"Disappeared three days ago bringing back an icebreaker AI designed for a corporate encryption scheme. Two days ago my system was hacked into and my codes were stolen. I think it's him - from the bitmap traces, the pattern's similar to what the icebreaker's should look like."

"Wait a sec - you're dealing with corporate data? Who are you? I wanna get an idea of what I'm getting into here."

"Just a 'fencer."

Fencer. Not that he engaged in any actual trespassing - that would be dangerous, not to mention prone to cases of tetanus. Rather, the term meant that he was a data merchant, a middleman trafficking in secret information he stole from corporations.

"So - what? Am I gonna have the corporates come after me?"

"If you were a bounty hunter from the big rings, yeah. But I need something quiet, I had to go through a lot of channels. You're safe for now. And plus-"

He drew a large insulated suitcase from the shadows and unclipped the locks. It opened with a wispy cloud of nitrogen vapour, revealing some vacuum-sealed plastic bags. A lot of them.

"Got a full case here, Joe, all vatgrown, the biomimetic plugs all in place. Worth a fortune. We'll even pay for your operation."

Holy shit, thought Dystopia Joe. The man looked back up at him, a smile creasing the part of his face not obscured by shadow.

"So, Joe, do we have a deal?"

**

As usual, his employer had given him only a name and a place. The place was called Block 27, level 5, West Rotovilla. The name: Lev Trance.

If there was anything that could be counted on in Rotovilla, it's that people tended to stay in their particular niches and hang out in the same spots for most of their lives. You could live on the same block as someone else and be in an entirely different city. This made it both extremely difficult and extremely easy to find a person, depending on where one looked. Joe was the kind of person that was paid to look for people, and when he wasn't drunk or high or out of cash, he could be pretty good at it. He was also paid to ask questions, and he'd done a lot of that, with and without a gun. It all depended on where one looked.

Joe reached the block by railbus. Overall, Rotovilla tended to be relatively uniform throughout, the same vast arcologies stretching blackly into the sky, the same blocks of sagging tenements and ugly slums duplicated infinitely throughout the neon night. It struck Joe then, as very odd when he found himself in that particular area of Rotovilla which had once been home to the industrial sector.

The Biz had run through its course there as well, and Rotovilla's heavy industries had all moved elsewhere, leaving behind a complex strangle of abandoned factories and warehouses, miles of giant pipes and tubes leading to the decaying husks of ancient automated refineries, still pumping and burning, endlessly.

All of these were stacked atop one another in craggy industrial towers of infinite complexity.

Joe took a slug from his hip flask and looked around. There was bound to be a local watering hole. There always was. He spotted it instantly, a square of neon and fluorescents glowing sickly pink and green, surrounded by the blue-black shadows. The sign said, quite simply, "The Watering Hole," and Joe figured that it was as good a place to start as any.

It was a roughneck hangout, as he could tell, seeing the cargo haulers parked in a covered alcove made from what used to be a warehouse. Inside it had all the constituents of such a place - loud, twangy, metallic-sounding music, lots of big sweaty men, and most importantly, a lot of scantily-clad blondes serving drinks that smelled and looked like hot sewage.

It was humid, with the heady aroma of beer mixing with the scent of stale sweat, and it was lit with a ruddy orange-red light. Surrounded by an array of blue neon, the bar counter was home to a wiry young man, clean-shaven, with greasy black hair, slicked back. He polished the counter with a stained rag.

Joe plopped himself down at one of the stools, keeping one stool's distance from the mountains of sweat and machine oil that were melting into the other seats.

"Gimme a shot of your strongest."

The bartender paused and seemed ready to wring his rag into a worse-looking shot glass.

"Uh - on second thought, gimme a beer."

"Alright."

As the corroded-looking plastic mug filled with piss-coloured hooch slid to a halt in front of him, Joe placed his PDA on the counter and the hologram of Lev Trance appeared, floating in the air. He took out his hip flask and poured a shot into the corrosive-looking stuff and started swishing it around as he gestured idly to the hovering image.

"Hey," he said, "You ever see this guy?"

"Yeah," said the bartender. "He's a regular. Always kinda shifty. He liked the girls, especially Marlie Tooms, over there."

The bartender pointed to a coiffed, pneumatic platinum blonde whose spherical, silicone caricatures of breasts were painted in bright fluorescent green, according to modern fashion.

"Ey, Marlie! C'mere! Dick wants ta talk to youse!"

"Wait, I didn't-"

"Youse a private dick, right? I see it all the time on the vidnets. Dicks're always comin' ta bartenders ta ask about people, aren't they? "

"Whaddaya want, Vern?" said the cocktail waitress, petulantly cocking an eyebrow.

"This fine gennelman wants ta ask youse a coupla questions. You know, jus' like the private dicks on the vids! He wants ta know about Lev."

"Aww, why dintcha say so, ya stupid moose? What's to know, dick? Make it snappy, I'm a busy girl yaknow."

She turned to Joe. He noticed that her skin was tattooed with subdermal smartplax grafts that made coloured images and symbols swarm over her exposed torso. Her nipples had frowning faces on them.

"Just a couple of questions is all. Tell me about him. Anything you can remember about him."

Marlie thought for a moment.

"Mmm… I dunno. Kinda funny lookin'."

"Funny, like funny ha-ha or funny weird?"

"Funny weird. Tawked a lot. 'Specially after we had sex."

"You had sex?"

"Oh yeah, sure," said the waitress, a flurry of symbols racing like radioactive fireflies across her shoulders.

"Marlie has sex with everybody," interjected the bartender.

"But wit' Lev more than others. We really had somethin' goin'."

"Where?"

"Oh, everywhere convenient, y'know? In the alleys, in the car, in the back room over there." She pointed to the broom closet where quiet rutting noises were emanating from.

"Did you ever go to his apt'?"

"Awl the time, hun. That's where he'd tawk the most. Lotta funny ideas about stuff. He liked to tawk after we had sex. A lotta, y'know, whatchacallit? Dat stuff where you're tawkin' about all the political things?"

"Politics?"

"Yeah! That! He liked that! He'd get all, y'know, political."

"Yeah, okay, cool. But do you remember anything specific?"

"Uhm… no. Not really. He was kinda funny-lookin', so I mostly looked at him lookin' all funny-lookin', and nodded yes when he wanted me to. Sometimes he'd get really testy about it, y'know? He'd get real excited and wanna get up and, I dunno, build bombs or somethin', and we'd start havin' sex again. Maybe five or six times a night. He was kinda funny that way."

Dystopia Joe could tell that this was getting him nowhere. Marlie's mind seemed to revolve around sex and funny-looking people. After her story, he felt that it was definitely nigh time to leave.

"Okay. One last question - where'd he live?"

**

Lev Trance's place was in the basement of what was once a factory, built atop the ruins of what had formerly been a steel mill or processing plant. It overlooked an orange sea of refineries, the burnoff towers setting afire the gloom of Rotovilla's eternal night. Apparently it had been too expensive to level the entire field and build buildings on it, so the city had grown around it, forming a ceiling hundreds of metra above, a yawning black expanse hellishly lit by the incessant, tumultuous roar of automated industry.

Joe forced an entry through a window left ajar and descended a long flight of iron catwalks and twisting, complex grids of pipes, bleeding rust onto the pale, yellowing walls. It was lit by the intermittent, cathartic urine light of mining lamps strung on the wall, parallel the narrow grating. He drew his needle gun.

He reached a small room at the end of the corridor at the base of the stairway. It was unlocked, and he pushed it open with only a slight squeak of resistance. Inside he found the typical rat's nest of papers, clothing, and miscellaneous trash. Yesteryear's flesh glittered on mimeozines strewn across the floor. A feeble incandescent dangled from a wire in the ceiling. The place smelled worse than a skunk's family reunion held in a convention centre located in a landfill.

He gave the place the once-over and made sure there weren't any booby traps concealed in the shadows - no flechette guns on a dead-man's trigger, no robot mines in the corners. His eyes ran around the squalid little apt. It was one big room, serving as a living room and bed room, with a pair of small side nooks, one on a movable track, doubling as a bathroom and washing machine, and a closet.

Doesn't seem like much, he thought.

As his eyes panned westward, he noticed a mildew and mold-encrusted computer, sitting dryly in a corner upon a rickety card table overburdened with obsolete and mouldering electronics. Behind the computer, mounted upon the wall, was a large piece of coarse, moth-eaten burlap, pinned to the wall with nails. Dystopia Joe walked over and lifted a corner.

Bingo. Paydirt.

Joe unscrewed the metal cap of his gin and drank in celebration of his good fortune.

The wall behind the flap of cloth was covered in an immense and intricate series of drawings and blueprints, and numerous notes were tacked and stuck upon them with tape, scrawled in entirely illegible black handwriting. As Joe's eyes panned carefully over the crazed mess of diagrams and maps, a subtle realization began slowly dawning upon him. He raised the burlap curtain further, searching for a word, a key term that would prove his growing suspicions. Arrows and lines were crudely drawn using black charcoal, linking one blueprint to another, a growing, schizophrenic tracery of increasing complexity that have made even computer chip designers and neurophysiologists groan and reach for an aspirin.

"C'mon, c'mon, you bastard, where are you going with this? Where are you-"

The lines converged on a single point, an old chemical refinery upon which rested one of the massive structural braces that held up the framework for a complex array of overlapping arcologies, around which had grown a crude warren of sweaty low-income tenements. The refinery was connected by a series of old sewage lines, apparently one of the ancient recyclers that'd feed industrial and human waste into massive processing vats, where anaerobic bacteria would convert the liquid matter into
raw petroleum. The feedback pipes, huge, decaying things a hundred feet in diameter, still fed back into the main supply lines, still pulsing slowly with oil, like immense metal arteries.

"The pipes are still working! Oh my God, you sick sonuvabitch, you're gonna blow it up, aren't you? You're gonna blow it up!"

"Not bad. Too bad you won't get anything for all your hard work, 'cuz you ain't goin' nowhere, gumshoe," a thick, gravelly voice one-linered.

A click and the high pitched whine of solid-state electronics rose behind his head.

I thought that only happened in movies! thought Joe, and ducked.

Not a moment later the wall before of him exploded, scattering flaming bits of paper and flecks of plaster and drywall in a sick-smelling white cloud of deadly confetti. The detective rolled on the floor, a flurry of beige cloth and one flying fedora, his needle gun drawn. He took cover behind a conveniently situated couch as shots rang out about him, missing cleanly.

His heart beating wildly, Joe quickly scanned around the room. He spotted his battered hat lying solemnly in a corner near a pile of cardboard boxes. There was a bullet hole through it, still smoking.

That bastard!

Joe whipped around the couch, firing madly, the needle bullets tearing through the air like the whispery screams of ghosts. He scampered across the room and wedged himself in the crevice between the boxes and a wall, and placed his poor abused fedora back atop its rightful throne upon his head. He fingered his hip flask and took a deep slug of the stuff and at that moment, the cardboard boxes proceeded to burst rather violently, spraying dust and burning papery pieces about as bullets tore cleanly through them. He ducked out and returned fire.

With bullets ricocheting around the room as the two men dueled, causing hundreds of credits worth in damages, one proceeded to hit a rather oddly placed ceramic paperweight, bouncing off of it and smashing into an ornamental plumbing fixture, which then propelled it whizzingly into the sole light bulb in the room. With the twinkling tintinnabulation of breaking glass the light went out, and everything was suffused with the shadowy, pale luminescence of the world outside, streaming through the window at the far end of the room.

Dystopia Joe fired wildly. In dodging, Lev Trance tripped over a wire and bumped his head.

"ARGH!" he screamed, leading the detective to believe that he'd scored a hit.

Trance scrambled to the window, kicked it open, and made a hasty departure. Joe looked up and saw the man's silhouette, tumbling headlong out into the world. He heard a thud and a juicy curse as the guy landed on a bare metal catwalk not far below and began running. Naturally, he followed.

**

Hard synthetic rubber soles click-clacking on the hard catwalk, Dystopia Joe pursued his culprit down a long alley between two huge factory towers, over which yawned the dense vastness of a series of city structures, antennae and rusting poles and abandoned service scaffolds jutting from the sides, like the needles of a metal cactus. Gratings and grilles interlaced with wild, crazy networks of pipes and tubes, creating an insane industrial matrix, a spider-web that arched blackly over the fiery refineryscape.

Lev Trance zig-zagged through shadowy hulks of machinery and under immense sewer pipes, the sounds of his gunshots screaming down the alleyway as the bullets struck sparks off of metal plates and walls of bare, graffiti-stained ferrocrete. All around thudded the heavy, sullen sound of a beating mechanical heart, the hollow noise of vast pieces of metal pounding against one another, echoing the sound of both men's hearts pumping blood past their ears.

Trance ducked behind a vent wherefrom rose a column of white steam, a man-shaped silhouette through the acidic light of halogen safety lamps and turned the corner. Dystopia Joe pulled out an empty clip and reloaded his needle gun, and fired. A stream of needle bullets cut through a small pipe like a laser beam through butter, exploding in little novas of blue fire on the wall behind it. He followed Trance, the hard sound of the man's footsteps disappearing down the adjacent access corridor.

He dashed through a pipeline forest, an engineer's nightmare, an industrialist's wet dream, palm sweaty against the handgrip of his gun. It was like an oil refinery on steroids. All perspective was lost in an endless labyrinth of tubes and machinery, his head spinning with the twisted logic of the place, but perhaps that was just his body telling him that, no, he was not, in fact, an Olympic triathlon runner.

The detective slowed to a halt and leaned against a whirring transformer housing as he slipped out his beloved hip flask and imbibed a long swig of the fiery liquid in the desperate, yet casual way that only a true private eye could. Going down, the drink was like being whopped at the back of your head by a rubber truncheon with a condom slipped over it - more painful than gross.

When his vision cleared, he looked up through the canopy of carbon-scored pipes and metal grating, and saw the dull, orange-lit cylindrical bulk of a distillation tower rise shimmeringly through the bright, hellish glow of burnoff tubes. At the base was a blocky, irregular service station, and it was surrounded by a snaking gridwork of catwalks and scaffolds. Dystopia Joe checked his pocket for another clip, just in case he ran out. Nothing. Joe canted his fedora, set his gun on single-fire, and loped down the path.

He found himself in a dimly lit, shadowy area, and while most of Rotovilla tended to be dim and shadowy, it seemed to the detective that this place was infused with a very disconcerting kind of shadiness, the kind that is made all the more disturbing by the sporadic, transient lighting than the darkness itself.

He heard footsteps, scrambling away on some higher level, and with his gun at the ready, Dystopia Joe found a stairwell and ascended some levels. He reached the third floor and walked carefully down a hallway that seemed for all purposes to be intentionally filled with smoke and steam, guided only by guts and instinct - the latter being the sense that is present in all private eyes who are drunk up to their eyeballs and two days without sleep. Joe found himself standing in a wide atrium, lit from above by a pale, yellow-white light that was punctuated by the lonely, whispering dervish dance of a single fan blade. He cast a long glance down each of the corridors that led in four different directions, and then stared up, to find that a pipe in the ceiling had sprung a leak and was drizzling water onto the floor.

"God, it almost looks like I've wandered into the set of a horror movie," he remarked to himself, and was surprised to find that his echo talked back.

"Too late! You're already living in one!" shouted Lev Trance from somewhere.

"What?"

A rustling apparition slid through the outgassing from a steam vent, and Joe fired, the bullet exploding on dull iron with a bright white flash.

"Can't you see?" cried the taunting voice. "It's inside you, man! Buzzing, flashing, glowing, screaming, pulsing, thudding, twirling, drizzling, jazzing, bopping, stopping, going, flying and dying! A system piled upon a system piled upon a system without rhyme, reason or logic!"

Trance slid down from a passageway behind him, and Joe whirled as he was grabbed by the man's strong, gnarled hands. He struggled and kicked, someone went "Oof" and with a stinging blow, his gun was knocked out from his hand and clattered upon the grate floor. Joe's eyes flew open and he was confronted by a manic, wild-eyed figure, violently throttling him, pressing him against the pipes that lined the wall. He was ugly enough on holoscreen, but up close, lit as he was in the swollen semi-darkness of the refinery's cherry-red and orange glow, face twisted in a psychotic grin, he looked positively demonic.

"Can't you see?" repeated Trance. "It's chaos! A chaotic, distributed, evolving, changing, biological network, like the synapses in your brain, connexions upon connexions upon connexions going every which way into infinity! And it's all coming together, you see? You see now?!"

Trance grabbed Joe's neck, and the detective battered wildly against the strong, wiry arms. They lifted him up, wedging his body against two pipes that glistened with moisture, running red with rust.

"What… are you talking about?!" gasped Dystopia Joe.

"Singularity, man! Technological fucking singularity, man! Logarithmic social change, electronics and population reaching that little part on the curve where they shoot off into infinity! But math doesn't work in the real world, no, it ain't a tidy little simulation, a little model, no, it just doesn't work like that! It's gonna go, run, run, run off into the darkness, and off the cliff it goes until it all blows the fuck up, MAN!"

With a heave and an absurd wriggle of his body, Joe managed to kick Trance in the gut and fall upon him in the process. He scrambled off as Trance coughed and heaved, and ran to the motor housing that his gun had slid to a halt against. His gun slipped into his hand and the detective snapped back, only to find Trance barreling headlong down the corridor and up a ladder. Joe went after him and struggled up the ladder.

**

He emerged on the roof of the service station, the base of the distillation tower looming up beside him, with its crazy cocoon of scaffolding jutting out every which way from its surface. The air was thick with the turgid smell of oil and burning, and black clouds of smoke hung over the pallid industrial landscape. He'd lost Trance - again.

"It doesn't have to be this way!" shouted Dystopia Joe to no one in particular.

"But it is, and there's nothing you can do to stop it!" cried a voice from above.

Trance was rapidly ascending the levels of the scaffold, nimbly leaping from platform to platform, crossing thin catwalks and railings, a creeping human spider navigating its own mazelike nest. Joe fired, more in frustration than anything, and went up.

As the detective slowly and carefully scrambled through the labyrinthine masses of scaffolding, he heard something, whistling through the twisted and rusting networks of tubes and planks. It was a sound alien to his experience, for music was something that was not common to Rotovilla. You would never hear a person humming or singing to himself on the street - to do so would be considered to be insane. Of course, Trance really was insane, so it didn't matter much either way. Joe looked up from the vertical cliff face of metal to which he was clinging, and saw Trance walking across a narrow iron I-beam, arms outstretched, whistling "Stairway to Heaven".

Joe had heard it before.

"I hate Stairway to Heaven!" he cried, setting his pistol to maximum power and firing wildly in Trance's general direction.

Needle bullets whizzed past Trance's ears. Trance apparently did not notice, as he whistled across the I-beam and onto another platform.

Joe swung around a corner, narrowly missing a conveniently placed pole and ran down a catwalk leading to a dead end and a vertical drop of nearly fifty metres, bridged only by the narrow I-beam. Joe took in the landscape, noticing the sheer drop, and walked back several steps, not feeling sufficiently smashed to trust himself to do the job right. He unscrewed the cap and tipped it back. Empty – he’d coaxed out the last few drops some time ago. He strode out on the beam, placing one foot delicately ahead of the other.

A toxic waste wind whipped around him, convection currents cycling the ghostly remains of old newspapers through the air, each breeze tugging at his billowing trenchcoat, which pulled at him like a beige sail. He shrugged it off and let it fly. A shot rang on the iron not twelve centimeters from his toes.

“Holy shit!”

He craned his neck around and fell off balance, arms gyrating wildly in the air, searching for a catch as he stumbled along the beam.

Another shot grazed his shoulder, tearing into his skin. He careened off the side, but his hands caught on the beam, and he grabbed it and held it tight, wrapping his arms and legs around it. The wind tugged at his hat, which, by a miracle of sweat, dandruff and sheer chutzpah, managed to stay firmly planted on his upside-down head. Joe was panting, gasping, a cold sweat soaking his hatbrim and back. With wide eyes, he glanced down at the abyss below, turned immediately from the glaring, yawning plunge, and began shimmying for his life to the other side. Bullets blew sparks and shrapnel around him.

A close shot made him jerk his hand away and he fell over backwards, legs still clamped around the bar. His hip flask slid out from his pocket and tumbled away, seeming to pause a moment, glitter as fiery light played over its silvery surface, and disappear out of his field of vision.

Blood roaring in his ears, Joe reached back up, pulling himself forward. The other side seemed just out of reach, getting slowly closer and closer. He inched further and further, the wind a primaeval scream, blowing past him like millions of tiny hands, plucking at his clothing, beckoning him to let himself fly. There was a crack, and a surge of pain suddenly flashed white up his leg, and he screamed, hot blood trickling through his pants. He gave a final pull, straining to get across the I-beam, begging his leg not to fail. Something snapped, and he lost his grip with his legs. Joe dangled in free space, sweaty hands clenching the cold iron of the beam.

He kicked aimlessly in air, and his vision swam in all directions, all sense of perspective obscured and twisted into a roiling, insane epileptic attack of tridimensionality. As his hands crept across the top of the I-beam, his grip slowly slipping away, his eyes whirled about wildly, searching for anything, any frame of reference. All he sensed was that he felt like he was falling in all directions at once, as if suspended in space, as if the buildings, receding into the distance in every angle, emitted a vast gravitational field, attempting to pry him from his tiny island of safety. Another blast from somewhere rang like a death knell on the iron beam, sending stinging shrapnel into his hands. His hands slipped and he fell.

Arms flailing wildly, he disappeared into a black moment, a void of inner mental space, all the images of hot neon and electricity coursing throughout his experience compacted into a single searing burst of light and noise and chaos, like the glowing crimson spiral of an electric stove undergoing nuclear meltdown. And his hands found a grip.

Joe’s innards lurched sickeningly as inertia caught up with him, and he opened his eyes. His hat was tumbling in slow-motion as if in free-fall. He saw his hand reach out and snatch it in mid-air. He saw it being brought towards himself, and whipped around expertly, and it found itself placed firmly again atop his head.

Reality came back with a silent rush, like the gust of cold air being sucked into a room through an open door.

He was dangling, both hands clenched firmly to a tube attached to a nearby platform. The pain in his leg was a dull red throb of warmth, and the blood was soaking, dark and wet, into his pants. The detective pulled himself up and landed upon his belly on the platform. He scrambled to his feet and took off down the corridor.

He weaved blindly through a maze of steel and halogen lights, as if guided by smell to his prey.

An iron grate stairway led him to the top floor; a ladder took him to the outside of the distillation tower.

It was a gently curving off-white dome of metal, dulled and pitted, in patches fly-specked by ages of soot and oil hovering in dense, dirty congeries of pollution. At the far end was a bridge that led to a tower on the opposite side from where he’d come. In the distance, upon the other tower, stood a figure, dark against the ochre light of the world around him.

The two men ran towards each other, guns ablaze.

Bullets tore air past their bodies, they ducked and rolled, somersaulting, scrambled up and ran again. Joe’s pistol was hot as superaccelerated needles of metal flew out of its short muzzle. Trance went down as Joe stumbled, pain shooting up his leg, and they crawled towards one another.

Meeting in the centre, Joe’s pistol clicked. Empty. Trance heaved, panting and gasping, towards the detective, clutching at his gut. Joe propped himself up against the guardrail and sat there, waiting his end. Trance stood over him, a great, looming figure, and his cruel lips twisted in a crude approximation of a smile. He raised his gun.

With a despairing burst of strength, Joe tackled him, and the gun fired once off into oblivion, and he was upon the man, wrestling him for control of the gun. Not in the mood to waste time in futile combat, as Trance was a lot bigger than the wiry detective, Joe simply kneed Trance in the groin, stuffed his hat into Trance’s mouth as he cried out in pain, and smashed the man’s gun hand against the railing. Joe grabbed the gun and stood up, leaning against the guardrail, and pointed the pistol. One shot left.

Trance spit out the hat and crawled backwards, staring at Joe, massaging his abused balls with one hand.

“You’re trapped, you know,” grated Trance.

Joe said nothing.

“You kill me, you get some cash. You know you’ll just lose it in a couple of weeks anyway, and you’ll be back to square one.”

”I’ll be alive.”

“Alive? Yeah, some kind of life. Living in limbo, never getting from one place to the next, schlepping from one deal to another, like it is for everyone. Zombie, man. You’re just another fuckin’ zombie. What’re you waiting for? For me to reveal some world-shattering revelation?”

”Give me the access codes and deactivate the triggers. You don’t need to blow it up. Think about all those people!”

Trance tapped his head.

“It’s all about what’s in here, huh? Ten kilotons of quantum explosives and thirty gigs of data. How much is it worth, compared to the moment?”

“What?”

”The moment, man. The Rush. One big burst of freedom where you’re flying, man. Like a fire.”

“But you’ll die. You’ll kill thousands of people. What about them?”

“You ever hear about Prometheus?”

Joe shot him.

“No.”

**

He iced the head and returned it to the man in black who hired him. He got himself fixed up at one of the surgery shops, all expenses paid, and lived the good life for three weeks.

Joe was sitting in his apartment, playing solitaire and chain smoking while he watched the ceiling fan slowly turn. On the door, with the word ‘private eye’ marked on the opaque window, his landlord, Crazy Akhmed, demanded the rent again. Joe pulled out his needle gun from a drawer and put a hole through the window, and through Akhmed’s little red fez.

He was broke, down and out again, and had more bounties on his head than a South American dictator. He was waiting, apathetically, for the day someone would put a hole through him. Watching that fan turn, his mind turned back to the Trance case some time ago. The guy was crazy, that was for sure – the man in black had told Joe that the mnemonic implants that Trance was carrying in his head had started leaking, corrupting his neural net. And yet…

The phone rang. Joe picked it up, lighting a new cigarette.

“This Dystopia Joe. I’m a private eye.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know,” said the voice. The viewer was blank, save for a caption that said ‘no image available’.

Man, this guy is on something, thought Joe.

“Listen, I gotta job for you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Can you meet me today?”

”Wait just a second. What’s the job? And does it involve explosions?”

“Maybe? See these guys last Sunday, they ran off with a suitcase fulla Hexedrine that I was delivering to Don Sanguinario”

“Nah.”

“C’mon, I’ll pay you big.”

“I don’t do explosions anymore, sorry.”

Joe hung up, and the viewer winked off.  He puffed his cigarette, and waited for someone to call. Someone with suspicions about his wife. Anyone.