Next of Kin

Chapter Nine: 29%

Nine, 29%

It was getting dark when I drove away from Michelle's garage. I wasn't a paranoid man, but that seemed like a bad omen. I wasn't happy to have paid again to replace my receiver, but since I had, I figured I'd get the most out of my money. I looked over my usual stations, and realized my usual music was likely to negatively impact my audience, so I chose a pop music station and left it on low in the background.

The music cut out abruptly as I entered the dead zone. A second later I lost GPS, then phone coverage. I wondered if the audience could still see me, or no, until I saw in the chat that several people were arguing over whether or not they were having connection issues, since they'd lost part of the feed.

From inside the dead zone, the places where the connection was weakest were easier to see. It was essentially a relief map of where the tower repeaters were.

Then, at another light, I was approached by a tall, dark man holding a shotgun to my passenger window. I'd heard rumors that the most recent couple of Sontem windshields were essentially bullet proof. I wasn't about to test it.

His face didn't look human, and for a moment I thought he was wearing a mask, but it changed, almost sparkling as he moved. He was pixelated.

I turned off the car and stepped out, with my hands up. “You go the rest of the way on foot,” the man with the shotgun said, pointing with the gun. I started to walk off in that direction. I wondered if I'd come back to find that my new receiver was gone, and maybe my wheels. Possibly the entire car.

A block up, another shotgun-wielding guard stopped me. “Weapons? Anything to declare?” I shook my head, and he looked me over. His interface was clearly scanning me. Then he stepped to the side. “You're clear.”

I walked past him, through a pleated red curtain, into an improvised structure welded together from sheets of metal. Inside was a young woman, perhaps no older than me. She had dark hair with blonde highlights, and I wasn't sure what it was naturally, under the hood of her gray sweatshirt. I couldn't tell if it was long or short, other than the few longer strands that extended past a pixelated circle obscuring her face; my lenses were preventing me from seeing her clearly.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“Advocacy,” I said.

“Then let me advocate sanity, for you. You aren't going to find what you're looking for, here. Go back to your life. Forget about this place.”

“Would that I could,” I said. “Does everybody get that reception? Or were you were expecting me?”

“Ever since the cops started querying the cameras surrounding us. Everybody gets the visual pat-down, but not everybody sees me. Do you know who I am?”

I glanced at the picture of her identification that showed on my interface, along with the descriptive text beneath it. “Santa Claws?” I asked, because that was what the title said. The picture was blurred out, just like her face. I figured I'd call her Sandy, just to preserve my own sanity.

“To you, I'm more of a Krampus,” she said. “And I'm pretty sure you've been naughty.”

“I just want to find the person who killed my brother,” I said, “then get back to my normal life.”

“Normal?” she asked. “Have you ever been free?”

“As in not in jail?”

“Society is a jail, your crappy little apartment your cell. You could even say that your terrible tutoring job is community service, trying to turn idiots into productive members of society- by which I mean getting them smart enough to be another wage slave.” Something told me when she mentioned my crappy apartment she wasn't throwing random elbows, she knew where I lived; she was elbow-deep in my personal information. “You've got a phone call, incidentally.”