No Dogs in Philly Read Free Page A

you
sometimes.”
    “ I don’t enjoy being pushed
around.”
    “ This isn’t the playground; you
can’t beat up every other kid and call yourself king shit of the
turd pile. There are rules.”
    They glared at each other. Eugene looked away,
out the window. The rain was coming harder now, coming up to be a
good ol’ spring thunderstorm. Saru downed her bourbon and held the
glass out for a refill. Eugene filled her glass. He squinted his
eyes shut and Saru guessed he was shooting out a command to Sissy
to cancel his next meeting. Wordlessly he packed a long, curving
vape with some hash and a few stimulants. They smoked and stared
out at the storm. An elzi had gotten stuck on one of the barbs on
the iron fence around the building. They watched him jerk himself
free, leaving his hand and most of the forearm behind. He stumbled
down the street, causing pedestrians to scuttle to the other side.
A cop came over and herded him into a paddy wagon.
    “ Shit,” Saru said. “There’s no way
out of this, is there?”
    Almost as soon as she said it, there was a
knock on the door, soft, polite, Sissy.
    “ Come in,” Eugene said. The door
opened and she stepped in. She looked ruffled,
uncomfortable—uncharacteristic. Even before she spoke Saru knew
what she would say:
    “ Mr. Gercer-han Bernstein? There
are two gentlemen here to see you. They say they belong to the
Gaespora.”
     

Chapter 2
    What they didn’t understand was the
simplicity—it was killing him. He’d been operating on three to
seven layers of consciousness since he was sixteen years old and
now that was gone. They had hacked away all his distractions, all
his facets—his virtual kingdoms, virtual sex, his mischief, news
feeds, criminal enterprises, and voyeurism. He’d been flitting from
implant to implant, seeing life through other people’s eyes and
tongues and cocks and skin for so long that now, trapped in his own
fat body, he was disgusted with himself. Is this what he was? A
blob of flesh in a ratty armchair with a catheter and a feeding
tube—when had he even put that in? Had it been a good idea at the
time? Now without the freedom to eat the meals of others he was
stuck sucking down the phlegmy white goo that sustained him. He
shouldn’t have been fat—he hadn’t even bothered to measure the
input. He’d just jammed it in and swum back to the Net. God, would
he have swollen up like a balloon, would he have burst eventually?
Or would the fat have squeezed against his veins until they clamped
shut and his brain went dead?
    Now his whole existence was focused on the
search, the girl, the streets of Philadelphia, the homeless
shelters, the crack dens, the whorehouses and strip clubs, the
private sex clubs, and the orphanages. How old was she? They didn’t
know. What did she look like? Blue eyes, eyes so blue they hurt.
Was that it? Yes. He was starting to despair. He twitched his eyes
to the left, the bucket with his toes. What would they take next? A
new day was dawning. It occurred to him that traveling up from his
feet they would eventually reach his cock, and then he thrust
himself back into the search, records, records, records. Blue-eyed
girls, and one other clue—the arson. She had killed a man
apparently, allegedly, burned him to ash. A friend of theirs?
Maybe. How did they know? They just knew.
    He found himself cursing the police for their
incompetence, cursing the media for their neglect—couldn’t they
even note a building burning down? Wasn’t that worth a footnote in
the paper? If it even was a building. It could have been a car or
an outhouse or a submarine for all he knew, vaporized by a girl
with blue, blue eyes. He was going to die, he realized. He was
going to be chopped apart piece by piece by piece. The creepiest
part was the way they watched him. All four of them—maybe there was
a fifth standing guard upstairs—they sat, eyes closed but pointed
at him. They were still, perfectly still like statues, and silent.
The