Memento Mori

1.5 - NIGHT LIGHT

"We're a two man outfit. I'm coming with you." Standing, I palm the credits with a smirk. "Besides, we both know you need the backup."

"Don't let it get to your head, kid."

She sends me skittering towards the door with a slap on the ass. Flushing red, entirely aware of the amusement on Ulysses' face as he watches the exchange, I grab Krey from the bar and head outside, bristling at the post-midnight cold.

The air stinks of smog and lighter smoke. Skirting around piles of trash, we head for the thin bridges that span the immense chasms between the towers. I lean my head over the edge of a concrete railing, looking down the glittering layers of the Vents. Storefronts and apartments shine neon light across the towersides. The further down the towers stretch, the closer they get to the Abyss that yawns black and empty beneath us all, the thinner the towers grow. Layers more scattered, lights more infrequent, tapering down to a point until all that's left is a skeleton lattice of half-finished towers and bones of abandoned construction. There they end. Hanging over an infinite nothingness.

Stare too long, and you start to understand why some people jump.

Krey's autobike, like all autobikes, is completely illegal to run in the undercity. Officially, the only place these things get used is on the glass highways curling above the surface districts. That doesn't stop Venters from jacking them, overriding their prebuilt taxi programming, and playing loose goose with the pedestrian bridges down here. Not hard to see why. The machines are hot. Smooth, orblike wheels. Oscillating spectrum of running lights. Gleaming black frame, smooth, like a jaguar mid-stride. Electric engine already purring as we saddle up and I open a projector screen on my JOY, using holographic keys to send an address to the bike. The running lights flick on a moment later, and we're off.

This late at night, there's little but that strange mix of cold and muggy air, wind howling in my ears, the bike humming between my legs. Clamping my hands along the tail of the bike, I arch back and let my head hang over the rear wheel, hair ripping out of its braid into a peach-colored tail.

As we race over a thirty-meter bridge between two blocks, moonlight from a seam between twoovercity districts shines down through the jenga tower of bridges and hovertransports and undercity layers. My eyes widen to drink in the stars. The silver orb hanging front and center.

Then it's gone. We're in the next block. Hard black roof fifteen stories up, cruising along the layer's perimeter past closed businesses and beating clubs, bars vomiting groups of midnight patrons, drugged out Shockers slumped over empty bottles next to dumpsters and runoff, small-time thugs smoking on plastic chairs around tiny plastic tables, someone getting their guts punched out into an alley for not paying up on a bet, someone getting shivved, a brown-haired mother hanging her clothes out to dry on a second-story balcony.

Krey never slows or accelerates. Immune to the sights, cruise control on, fingering an old pendant that hangs around his neck. I slowly shift on the bike until I'm facing backwards, legs straddling the rear wheel. Tug my headset back up over my ears, and let the city slide into a neon blur of dreams that never existed and promises never made.

This is the Vents those tourists never see. They come down for a taste of the undercity. Us who can't escape it, we live further from the lights than they'll ever go.

My apartment complex doesn't have a name. Halfway down the Vents on the northwest corner of the Masada block, it's a rusty tower no different from any other. Not the best block, not the safest, but worlds better than the one I clawed my way out of. And the takeout place two doors down is a pilgrimage site for the rest of the undercity. Krey pulls up on the street beside the entrance, shuttered blast-door steel guarded by a sulfur-yellow halogen and a holoterminal covered in a second skin of graffiti. The frazzled projector in the terminal kicks to life when I swing off the bike, then starts choking when I sit on top of it.