Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, the Official Pirate Edition by Nas Hedron Read Free Book Online Page B

Carmen follows me a few steps into the hall.
    “What’s going on?” she asks.
    “Damned mysterious.”
    “What are these angles you’re following up?”
    “I need some rest and some time away from this freakshow so I can think. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
    My evasiveness catches her attention and one eyebrow rises for the second time in one day. A record.
    “Okay,” she says. “I’ll see what Alan and I can dig up.”

Six: Suerte y Muerte
    I don’t want to go back to my office, don’t want the distractions that could ambush me there: accounts; messages from clients past, present, and potential. It’s impossible to avoid, though, since the office is on the main floor of the building where I live on Jung Jing Road. Chinatown, like most areas of L.A. has changed considerably since Before—my term for my life pre-accident—not least due to earthquake damage. What is built is never exactly what was there before, and sometimes doesn’t resemble it at all. I never really explored this area Before, so I don’t know what it was like then, but now Jung Jing Road is a very short stretch of low-rise, supposedly earthquake-resistant, buildings. There are shops and businesses on the lower floors and residences extending four or five stories above them.
    There are a number of reasons I decided to locate here. Some of them are small things, like my love of Chinese art and a good dim sum. Some run a little deeper. For instance, since China turned inward after the fall of the Empire, this area gives me the closest facsimile I can get to a part of the world I will never see for myself. The main reason, though, is that for me it’s a luxury to live in a neighborhood where I can’t understand what anyone’s talking about.
    In my business I see so much of what’s evil in humanity, or simply what’s crass, cheap, and dreary, that it’s enough to sour you on people if you don’t get a break. It’s a relief not to understand what my fellow human beings are saying. People pass me on the street talking, sometimes arguing or upset, but I’m insulated from it. Music blares from businesses up and down the block, but if the lyrics are mundane or foolish it doesn’t matter—I have no idea what they mean. The neon signs may promise things they can’t deliver, as they do in any neighborhood, but I can’t read them. I find it easier to think well of people that way. Don’t get me wrong, I like people, it’s just that I’m in such close contact with their sins so much of the time that when I come home it’s nice to enter a zone of relative ignorance. The neighborhood is far from quiet, but for me coming here is like being shrouded in silence.
    Even to get to that comfort zone, though, I have to take an indirect route. Several of the blocks south of my apartment have been quarantined with an outbreak of monkeypox C, an orthopox virus similar to smallpox. Unlike the original, unmutated monkeypox, it isn’t susceptible to the smallpox vaccine. With no effective vaccine, outbreaks aren’t uncommon, and though the mortality rate isn’t high, it’s high enough to warrant quarantine.
    I woke up from death into a very changed world. Some changes I adapted to pretty much immediately, but this one took time, this constant drumbeat of emerging infectious diseases and the facility everyone has with the language, as though the general population had suddenly acquired M.D.s. The overuse of antibiotics rendered many antibiotics ineffective, as “superbugs” evolved which were invulnerable to them. The overuse of pesticides led to a similar phenomenon amongst insects. Insects don’t evolve and adapt as quickly as microorganisms, but they still do it damned quickly. Soon mosquitoes, tics, and fleas that were resistant to pesticides were carrying diseases resistant to antibiotics. Add to that the use of high-speed international travel during the Empire and the large-scale migrations of refugees during the Fall, and what resulted was