Liquid Cool: The Cyberpunk Detective Series by Austin Dragon Read Free Book Online

especially bad year of reflection for me, which is why I was here sitting in my red Ford Pony, hiding out on a street I've never been, far from any part of the city I had ever been, so I could just sit, stare at the falling rain, and simmer in my own perennial moroseness and not be bothered by the girlfriend, friends, enemies, frenemies, sidewalk johnnies, hustlers, or any strangers.
    The only interruption to the steady rain was the ubiquitous flashing neon and video signs. I paid no attention to the specific ads or messages they were peddling. It was always the same. The corporate ads wanted you to buy something, and the government ads wanted you to do something. The average citizen in a normal day was supposedly bombarded by no less than 50 thousand messages in the city. No wonder people were stupid. All those subliminal messages were taking up all the free space in a person's brain--the universe's ultimate disk hardware.
    My hiding spot was one of the few less bombarded parts of the neon jungle. The neon signs, video ads, flashing street lights, flashing beacons for sky traffic, and building side lights should be overwhelming, but we were all born into it--the visual madness. Most even thrived on it. Without the artificial light, all there would be would be the dark, rainy, griminess of city's urban landscape. That's what the colored eyewear that everyone always wore outside was really for--mitigation; being a must-have piece of technology was the after-thought.
    I had found a damn good hiding spot. I had set down in the residential alley, in the early morning hours, between two monolith buildings in Silver City--the center of the city's robotic production. I was lucky because such spaces between super-skyscrapers were not by design, but evidence of a building oversight. Buildings pushed up into the dark sky and sprawled out vertically to cover every inch. With people stacked on top of each other, building by building, space was one of the most important commodities. And here I was, lounging around in the unplanned alleyway, the hover-car equivalent of a sidewalk johnny, staring up at the rain. It was a good hiding spot and I planned to use it often.
     
    I saw it. The hover-taxicab descended from at the uppermost part of the alleyway, on the left, about twenty-five feet or so in the air.
    "Damn," I said to myself. It was one of Run-Time's.
    I chose Silver City because, since it was so automated, there were far less workers here than the rest of the City. Less people meant less public transportation, less hover-cars, and less hover-taxis. But they found me anyway.
    The hover-cab started to rise back in the air and did a one-eighty to fly away, back the way it must have come.
    The cabbie would call dispatch, and dispatch would call Run-Time. If Run-Time was really looking for someone and you were in Metropolis, consider yourself found, unless you were hiding down in the sewers with water rats, "un-killable" jumbo roaches, and whatever roly-poly isopods were lurking and swimming around in the filth. No one did that. I didn't need to check my mobile. I knew people were looking for me. For a nobody, I sure was treated like a somebody.
    All I had to do was push a button to start the engine of my classic Ford Pony. High-performance, super-charged, advanced nitro-acceleration hydrogen engine. A sleek, bright red muscle-vehicle coupe to make the average person gawk at and the mouths of the genuine hover-car enthusiast and collector hang open.
    I had fo und the shell in a junkyard over fifteen years ago when I was in middle school and it took me a few years to build and restore it, spare part by spare part. I had been upgrading it ever since. No one believed that I found and built such an expensive muscle hover-car from scratch, but it was true and I drove it every day. It was considered a true classic and got me solid offers to part with it almost every week, but you don't sell a classic Ford Pony; it's a purchase for life--like a