Noir by K. W. Jeter Read Free Book Online Page B

agendas the same way, either in the dark or a wavering, battery-fed glow, flashlights duct-taped to the water-stained ceilings.
    “Here you go.” McNihil handed a cup, no saucer, to the cube bunny. It was the only cup in the place without a cracked rim.
    “Thanks.” She held it cradled in both hands. She managed to conceal her distaste for the ersatz as she took a sip. And even lifted a slightly apologetic smile toward him. “That’s not too bad.”
    “Nothing ever is.” McNihil lowered himself into the frayed upholstery of the chair across from her. “Too bad, I mean.” He could seehimself in the black mirror of his own heavy restaurant-china cup. “It’s amazing what people can get used to.” He looked the same, he supposed, in this world and the other one. “Take me, for instance. Little while ago, I was inhaling a dead man’s breath. As if the poor bastard could breathe at all. And you know what?” McNihil leaned back, watching for her reaction. “It didn’t bother me at all.”
    What he’d said didn’t faze her. The cube bunny’s eyes were tearless, the lashes’ cheap drugstore mascara unsmudged, as she regarded McNihil over the rim of the cup. Which meant, he supposed, that the late Travelt had been more than a meal ticket for her. She’d done her crying in some private place, out on the street.
Private
meaning that out there, no one would take any notice. Tears now would’ve meant self-pity and the play for her one-on-one audience’s sympathy.
    She lowered the cup, setting it down on the low table between them. Leaning forward, she peered into the centers of McNihil’s eyes, as if her lost tears could be found there. “You don’t see me,” she said finally. “I mean … you don’t see
me
.”
    Not stupid
, McNihil grudgingly admitted to himself. That was a mistake people made, to think that someone who lived the way she did would be an idiot. A surface phenomenon: a cube bunny’s looks, the way this one looked under the firm overlay he saw, was strictly a survival adaptation. They could be as smart as anyone else. Though that wouldn’t save them, either.
    “I see you fine,” said McNihil. His voice sounded stiff and uncomfortable, even to himself. That was his way of handling personal things. “I see you the way I want to. Or at least the way I’m used to.”
    “How’s that?” She had leaned so close to him, over the table, that she could’ve kissed him. Inside her eyes, McNihil could see himself, small and duplicated. “I don’t understand.”
    She couldn’t tell by looking at him; no one could. Some things were truly invisible. The micron-film inlays inside his eyes—inside the eyes of anyone who’d had the same kind of work done on them—had a refractive index clearer than any air that could be breathed in the Gloss. A scalpel and a set of dentist’s picks would’ve been necessary to dig out the interpreter relays running parallel to his optic nerves. And the stuff farther back, past the optic chiasma and into the soft processors of the occipital gyri and sulci … those dark little rooms were a mystery even before any of the other work had been done.
    “But I
know
,” the cube bunny said softly. “That you don’t. See right. I can tell.”
    McNihil wasn’t surprised by that, either. That was what cube bunnies were good at. It wasn’t their major job skill—their skin and flesh was that—but it was a major adjunct, anyway. The ability to tell things about people, to figure out in some deep nonverbal way what the score was. And how to profit thereby.
    Girls like her confounded the corporations. That’s what they’d evolved to do. The whole point of cube life, the logical extension of the system of shuffling employees in and out of workplace cubicles at random, had been revealed back at the millennium turn to be psychological warfare on the corporations’ own. What the human-resource managers and company psychs called
optimized transience disorientation
. It