That Nietzsche Thing Read Free Page A

the positions of power had their prayer rugs correctly oriented
toward DC. Constantine wouldn’t lift a single support of his mobile
command center until he was sure he had Seattle neatly in his
pocket.
    No, once Constantine was through, Seattle
wouldn’t be fit for a guy like me.
    So, it was with my best interests at heart
that I set out to string the whole Montavez case out for as long as
possible.
    I couldn’t see there was any real mystery
behind the murder and subsequent abduction. The body would show up.
If the Progs had taken it, they’d sooner or later play their hand.
If it was just some sort of sick joke...well, she’d wash up in the
Sound in the morning. As I said, she was already dead. There wasn’t
really much more that could happen to her.
    I’d gotten the girl’s address out of a small
notebook I’d found in a purse in the dumpster next to the body. Her
wallet was gone, along with any money or phone, or any ID, but the
battered notebook, with a bunch of torn out pages, had been tossed
aside by her attacker as nothing more than trash.
    All the remaining pages in the book were
blank, but I did that old Hardy Boys trick where you shade in the
impression left by the force of the pen writing on the sheet of
paper above the top page left on the pad.
    Of course, I didn’t have to do it with any
fucking piece of charcoal or lemon juice, or however they did it in
the books. I had a high dpi scanner and software custom designed
for the task. Fiddle with the chroma long enough and everything
that’d been written on the pages earlier in the book showed up as
shadowy outlines. There was always a lot of crazy overlap, as each
successive page added its own contents to the resulting image, but
usually you could make out something in the mess.
    I could make out the street name, Galer, and
the number of an apartment. I vaguely knew the apartment building,
up on Queen Anne Hill. But what the girl had been writing over and
over, on page after page in her little notebook, was what really
caught my attention. It freaked me out enough that I decided to
toss all the rest of the evidence away and falsify that report. If
the chief had gotten a look at what I saw on that computer screen,
he’d have told me to do the same without blinking an eye.
    On my computer screen I saw Q after
interlocking Q forming a crazy mosaic, covering every inch of the
reconstructed handwriting. Hidden amongst the Q’s I could just make
out the street address – a note she’d perhaps handed to someone –
but all the Q’s, that was freaky. Q after Q after Q.
    Okay, I should back-fill here, because you
have no idea what I’m talking about. Probably because you’re not
supposed to know what I’m talking about. All of this stuff, the
Gene Genies, Q, everything that happened, has successfully been
expelled from the official records. It’s like it’s some sort of
state secret. Though I don’t know why. None of it really shows the
Progs in a bad light. But then Progs never like anything that they
can’t control. Never have, never will. And none of this was under
their control. Maybe that, to Progs, is showing them in a bad
light. I don’t know.
    Anyway, you might have some memory of Geneing
and what it was. And that it’s been done away with. Sort of like
the Black Plague – but of drugs. Something horrible that happened
to other people long ago, but nothing anyone worries about
anymore.
    I guess that’s not too far from the truth.
Progs might not actually say it, but they hint that their social
programs did away with it. Like the New Deal and the Depression.
But don’t believe it. I’m here to tell you what really happened.
And the Progs didn’t have a fucking thing to do with it. Social
programs or not.
    Geneing first hit the streets in the early
20’s, selling itself as the ultimate designer drug. A drug you only
had to take once and then, forever, you could get high whenever you
wanted.
    It wasn’t really a drug, though.