Tattoo

Chapter Two

“Pretty cool, eh Neddy?” I prompted, over Billy’s terrible singing.

“Yeah,” he said, and then for emphasis, “Yeah.”

***

After that, we started to see the normals at our shows. It was at our gig at Arisen, a big venue in the industrial lands near the lakeshore, that it became obvious. Guys in suits; girls in miniskirts. Not our usual black-on-black crowd. I even thought I recognized a couple of the suits, from other shows.

I turned to Ned to ask him about that, when I saw  he was already staring at them with a peculiar intensity. The deadpan look that he’d worn when I first met him was back in force. 

“Noticed our serious boys from the ’burbs have you?” 

“Yeah,” answered Ned, seeming distracted. “Not sure if that’s what they are though.”

“You expecting trouble?”

He shook his head, “No, they just remind me of my old crowd.” He smiled and looked at the band tuning on stage. “But fuck the past, eh? We’ve got a future. Don’t we?”

His tone threw me. “Um hell, yeah, we’re the bomb. Look around you.”

He smiled and headed towards the stage.  But I noticed that his path through the crowd carried him well away from the guys in the black suits. 

When we’d hired Ned he’d seemed a bit of a burnout. And a bit old, too, but he was a hard drummer and rock solid. Nothing seemed to rattle him. Not the crowds, not the club owners or bouncers. So I didn’t know what to make of his reaction to the suits. Maybe he was a disgraced derivatives trader, a refugee from Bay Street. I smiled at the thought of Ned in a suit. 

Still, after that night I started looking for them at our other shows and I began to share Ned’s unease. They weren’t at all of our shows, and when they did show up, they blended with the young wannabe hip crowd. But whenever I saw Ned looking tense, or just a little too flat, I’d look closer, and sure enough, there they’d be. 

Then Aria offered us a record deal. – They were the new big thing around town - fresh to the game, but they talked and acted like they had deep pockets. Turned out that one of the suits that Ned had been worrying about was from the label. That night Ned got drunker than I’d ever seen him. 

“You ever worry that someone might use your electric ink to do shit? Rob banks or plant bombs or stuff like that?” he asked me.

I laughed. “Fuck, I’ve thought of doing that. But nobody knows this shit like me. My old prof at York might’ve, but he blew his brains out over some faculty politics. And even if they could work it out, it would be fucking idiotic, no one relies on video security anymore. It’s too easy to hack. It’s all DNA-linked biometrics now. I mean, hell, that’s why you had to give a blood sample last time you got your health card. The government’s been using DNA-linked cards for what, five, six years now? And even that’s getting to be old news. The BlueChip Corps have proteome-responsive dermals now, they don’t bother with your DNA, they just look at how it expresses itself. No bluffing that shit.” I shook my head and continued.“Not that they’ve licensed it to the spooks though. It’s just another example of how governments have to lick the boot-heels of their corporate overlords - that’ll teach ’em to cut research funding. It’s one of the big reasons I never finished grad school you know, all the cutbacks.”

“And the expulsion,” said Ned.

I laughed and took a sip of beer. “Yeah, but still, I coulda worked that out.” I leaned forward, “You know, it’s kinda funny how desperate the Feds are for new tech actually, and how out of touch they are. I mean I know some wetware punks that are starting to hack the DNA imprint on their driver’s licenses so that they can get drunk on a Saturday night. When I was in school, it was cutting edge, but now it’s one step from being a joke.”