The Scorpion Game Read online

  The Scorpion Game

  Age of Transcendence: Book One

  Daniel Jeffries

  The Scorpion Game

  Daniel Jeffries

  Copyright 2013 Daniel Jeffries

  Version 8.1.2016.01.21.0005

  Cover: Mitch Quina, Daniel Jeffries

  Editors: Rich McDowell and Marissa van Uden

  Check out all my work at my website:

  http://meuploads.com

  Join my Readers Group and my secret Facebook Group, the Nanopunk Posthuman Assassins, because you’ll get a chance to get advanced copies of everything I’m working on, plus early access to concept art, giveaways, special announcements and more! The FB group is also a fantastic place to talk about anything sci-fi, fantasy, movie, game, and tech related, so pop on in and meet a bunch of folks just like you!

  Lastly, you can check out my Medium blog right here.

  Thanks and Praise:

  Thanks to Mitchie for showing me that I can’t skip steps and that I should give myself to everything totally and completely. Thanks to my friend Nicole for saving my life when I was ready to give up. Thanks to my editor Marissa van Uden for her advice and help. A massive thanks to my developmental editor Rich McDowell, who made this book what it is with his brilliant and insightful suggestions. Thanks to my writing group, Graeme Ing, Debra Reed, Lisa Shapiro, Paula Margulies, Adrianna Lewis, and Leo Dufresne for their critiques and support over many, many years. Thanks to Mr. Harry Dawson, a true teacher and the one who showed me the way early. Thanks to the 3rd Space artist community for giving me a (usually) quiet spot away from home where I can get work done. Thanks to God for not killing me off before I could finish this and get myself free.

  Dedicated to all those who never gave me a shot.

  The Scorpion Game

  The Big Dive

  A Savage Place

  The Lesson

  What You’re Up Against

  The Chameleon

  The Ship Graveyard

  Where Do Monsters Come From

  Castles in the Sky

  It’s a Dead Man’s Party

  The Scorpion Game

  The Garden of Earthly Delights

  When it Rains Forever

  Bad for People

  The Doll Garden

  The Tyranny of Heaven

  Frenzied

  The Mouzi Lihuolun

  The Message

  The Illusionist

  And the Sun Goeth Down

  Well Met

  The Beginning of the End

  When Sirens Sing

  Things Fall Apart

  The Hot House

  Soft Machines and Citadels

  An Unexpected Savior

  A Dangerous Body

  Under the Knife

  Pastel Monsters

  A Thousand Faces

  We Thought of Everything

  The Last Few Minutes

  Catching Scorpions

  Getting Answers

  The Big Dive

  2458 Orthodox Western Calendar

  5156 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Dragon

  New Diamond City, Snowstorm Clan Roving Starship Settlement

  “Ain’t much left when you fall from that high,” said Sergeant Quinlin to a drenched, angry Lieutenant Durante Hoskin, who’d just bulled his way through the thick crowd and into the energy bubble that cut off the crime scene from the storm. Outside the bubble, the rain came down in hard, slashing sheets.

  “Why didn’t someone stop the rain?” said Hoskin. “Washed half the fuckin’ evidence away.”

  “Got here too late. She picked a bad time to jump,” said Quinlin.

  “As opposed to a good time?”

  Hoskin stood over the body, hands curled into fists, eyes flashing, his mustache etched into his sharp features, his salt and pepper hair slicked. Under a beaten black leather jacket his fierce red shirt stood out against his dark skin.

  Hoskin looked down at the covered body. The rain had already done its damage. Bits of the girl’s flesh floated lazily in blood-streaked pools. Who knew what clues the rain had already carried away?

  “We live in a place where they schedule the rain and nobody can get their heads outta their asses long enough to call the fuckin’ Weather Center?” said Hoskin.

  “Right. You ever call over there? Like pissin’ into the wind,” said Detective Danuba “Sugarhouse” Quinlin. Quinlin, a tall black man with a thick ‘fro, wore a hand-stitched, cream summer suit in a time when mites could cough one up custom in a few minutes. After an hour of rain, his suit didn’t have a drop on it. He must have waited until they had the energy bubble up over the crime scene before even getting out of his car. Hoskin looked at him and shook his head.

  “Nice of you to get outta the car,” said Hoskin.

  Quinlin mimed brushing lint from his lapel, with a grin.

  “Well, whadda we got? Whadda we know?” said Hoskin.

  “Jumper. Young girl, ligature marks on the neck. Hit legs first. Wisps caught the fall, called it in.”

  “Jumped? Or pushed?”

  “Guess we’ll find out.”

  “Where’d she fall from?”

  “Up there. Sixty-sixth floor.”

  Hoskin followed Quinlin’s finger up the side of an organic starscraper, stretching thousands of stories into the sky, its top hidden in the swirling mists of the troposphere, its flesh filled with bright little beads that twinkled, its diamond windows glittering like a trillion eyes. Squinting, he could barely see the smashed cathedral-style window, sixty-six floors up.

  “We got a John Doe upstairs. Team’s up there now. Story is she killed him and took a header,” said Quinlin.

  “Who’s ‘she’?”

  “Whore. But no embedded IDs, so she’s Jane Doe for now. Probably brought in on an entertainment visa. DNA’s not in the records. Machines are asking around.”

  Quinlin pulled back the sheet slightly and Hoskin saw the tiny, telltale blood tear tattoo of the Flower Smoke Girls, a group of high-class New Diamond City whores.

  “We got the playback?” asked Hoskin.

  “Yeah,” said Quinlin. A holographic film of a girl falling flared over his palm like a hovering flame. Microscopic wisp cameras, floating around the city like wind-blown dust, had caught the fall in excruciating detail and blasted a distress call to police, a patrolling suicide umbrella and an ambulance through the q-nets.

  The umbrella got there too late, hurtling towards the tumbling girl, unfolding like an origami mushroom, but just missing. The girl caught the edge of the umbrella and it spun her wickedly. Zoomed in, Hoskin could see the animal terror in her eyes as she screamed like her face had ripped open. In disgust, he waved the film away and it disappeared.

  Hoskin looked down at the lump under the white sheet. The sheet was cruelly short, barely covering the bulk of her shattered body, but exposing the hundred thousand bits of smashed flesh splashed like vomit on the ferroconcrete street. He could see the nanothreaded pavement had sensed her hit and softened, but from that height it didn’t matter.

  “All right, let’s see the whole body. Where’s the tech?” said Hoskin.

  “Shook up. Sitting over there. Saw something she wasn’t ready for,” said Quinlin.

  On the sidewalk’s edge a chunk of shadow sat hulking, clutching a med-scanner and an old-fashioned digital caliper used to measure bruises. It was the new girl, Zara, a rookie crime scene tech. She had six arms, a hard black shell and a face featureless except for a mouth. Hoskin couldn’t remember if the shell was common to her Phyle. Posthumanity had fractured into thousands of daughter species and he’d long since given up keeping track of all
of them.

  “You all right?” said Hoskin.

  Zara shook her head.

  “Just stay down until you’re ready. You’ll get used to it,” said Hoskin. “Takes time.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re fine. It’s someone who feels nothin’ that I worry about.”

  Hoskin left Zara and walked back to the jumper’s body.

  “Not sure even you’re ready for this one,” said Quinlin.

  A crowd had formed at the edge of the energy barriers and white-uniformed, white-gloved police on biomechanical stallions kept the curious at bay. Hoskin could see the sinewy muscles of the silver steeds pulsing and rippling, their flaring nostrils checking for nanocontaminants and poisons in the air, their backbrains quantum-linked to massive storehouses of chemical and forensic data. Security drones hovered in circles over the crowd, pushing reporter drones back. A lot of the crowd had come from the nearby protests of the perpetually unemployed. Their holographic signs still glowed brilliantly in the slashing rain, “Death To The Kleptocrats,” “Machines Will Steal YOUR Job Too.” They’d come just to gawk. The callousness of the crowd infuriated Hoskin.

  “Show me what we’re talking about here,” said Hoskin.

  Suddenly a gaggle of reporter drones outfoxed security and blazed forward, ripping off quick pictures. Hoskin seized one of them and smashed it on the street. It burst, its guts black and oozing. Security pods blasted the others with a freezing gel that made them boulder-heavy and they tumbled to the ground. The pods scooped the rigid bodies up and dumped them into a hovering timeloop porta-prison.

  “Everyone back, now,” shouted Hoskin, “Push all these idiots back. This is a person, not some fuckin’ sideshow for your amusement.”

  The cops cranked up their personal energy shields and shoved the crowd, who fell back raggedly, sizzling and screaming when the current smacked their soaked bodies.

  “All right, show me the body,” said Hoskin.

  Quinlin bent down, took a deep breath and peeled back the sheet. “You asked for it.”

  It took a second for what Hoskin was seeing to make sense. The image wouldn’t stick. That’s how the mind protected you, he knew: like when there’s a horrible wreck and everyone looks but nobody remembers what they saw. You had to look longer if you wanted to see, push past the shock until the scene started to piece itself together like a puzzle.

  A young girl lay on the street, twisted half to her left, as if she’d turned over during a nap. Her autumn burned-black hair, dashed with red fiber optic rivets, spread out around her face, which was half-smashed like a splattered pumpkin, her teeth crushed to dust. Her red and black spidersilk kimono had fallen open obscenely. Her legs and torso looked like an overturned bowl of spaghetti, the flesh utterly shredded. Hoskin had seen worse gore since he’d transferred to the New Diamond City force twenty years ago, and in his hundred and fifty plus years as a cop, but what got to him was on her nearly-intact torso: hundreds of eyes, some of them caught in a frozen blink, some of them burst like busted eggs, yolks leaking. She had six small breasts, and on her stomach were three stretched vaginas, arranged in a triangular pattern, looking like they’d just thrown up.

  “What the fuck am I looking at here, Sugar?” said Hoskin.

  “Don’t know. Worst I ever seen. Some kind of fetish. Gets worse.”

  “How?”

  “Rape kit showed semen in two of the—”

  “Remind me never to ask that again,” said Hoskin, looking down.

  Millions of tiny brushed-on specks of diamonds clung to the girl’s exquisite, bioluminous skin like a snug dress, a signature of the city’s nearly three million prostitutes.

  A deep-welled sadness swept through him. Beneath the spliced-in fetish mutations there was still a young girl: one who’d suffered.

  “She’s too young,” said Hoskin. “Can’t be legal.”

  He waved his hand over her like a magician, but the scan picked up no embedded IDs, just like Quinlin had said. Definitely illegal. Could have been brought in from any planet. Lots of whores didn’t register. They called it branding. Official estimates put the number of unregistered hookers at just under a million. That was New Diamond City alone and it was only one small part of a massive, continent sized, roving, organic and exotic energy starship called the Snowstorm Clan. The ship was one of fifteen in the universe, with whole civilizations churning inside of them, complete environments stuffed with an artificial microsun and an atmosphere that mimicked an ideal Earth in a bottle. Snowstorm started as a freewheeling, floating pleasure-palace for the rich, where anything went, so it had more whores per capita than some large planets.

  Outside the bubble the rain battered the street. The artificial moon drifted slowly through rips in the cloud cover.

  “She got no blackbox. They can’t relife her,” said Quinlin.

  “So what? Would you wanna come back to this?” said Hoskin, like he was spitting out insects. “Probably doesn’t have relife insurance anyway. Cover ‘er up.”

  He looked down at her again. “I’ll make whoever did this to ya suffer, girl. I promise you that.”

  A Savage Place

  The girl had fallen from an opulent, two thousand story nightclub called the City of Willows, the current hot spot for the velvet rope crowd. The light-tube up to the sixty-sixth floor went deliberately and maddeningly slow, so the pleasure seekers could soak in each level. Inside the soft column of light Hoskin paced and Quinlin lounged, smoking quietly, the cigarette draped from his lips.

  On the first floor they saw gambling tables, magicians, fireworks and light cages bursting with exotic animals, fans and floating flowers, shifting microrivers suspended high above the crowds by translucent light, incense booths and bubbles. One flight up they saw ice cream parlors, photographers, holographic films flickering, praying mantises in cages battling, half a dozen restaurants and troupes of tumbling actors. On another they saw shooting galleries, fan-tan tables and whores in high-collared Chinese gowns, slit up to their thighs. Seven flights up were several rows of exposed toilets, where people squatted in the center of the room, while a naked crowd surged around them dancing riotously in the low gray light to Heliochord music that changed when it reacted with the minds of the revelers, so that each heard their own song and hallucinated wildly.

  Quinlin closed his eyes, listening to a message on his internal nanonets.

  “Big problem,” flashed Quinlin, through an encrypted nanonet band.

  “What now?” flashed Hoskin.

  “John Doe ain’t no John Doe.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Not when it’s Kimball Turnbull.”

  “Councilman Turnbull? The junior Senator?”

  “The very same.”

  “That’s a fuckin’ disaster.”

  They were halfway up now. The thirty-ninth floor disrupted time, slowing it and speeding it up to the music. Hoskin froze mid-stride and then raced around the elevator as the music shifted gears and hit him with a burst of time.

  “This can’t get any worse,” flashed Hoskin.

  Quinlin shook his head, grinning. “You want me to remind you never to say that again now or later?”

  More floors passed in a blur, all of them running together: astonishing strippers in columns of hot pink light; hovering dance platforms; hundreds of bands; a red light room where women of every color and Phyle stood behind glass like delectable pastries; a floor where it rained perpetually; love letter booths with poets who scribbled in the air like sky writers; seesaws; scorpions glowing in cages of soft light; mah-jongg; a Ferris wheel that took up three floors; a topless foxy boxing room with female brawlers whose nipples stood erect as ancient Indian temples and wet women in black boots with red whips to spur them; a rollercoaster that coursed through thirty levels like a mythological snake; a dark room where flashes of pulsing light showed a twisting orgy; a mask room, where Halloween perpetually reigned; bondage floors with hideous spiked
tables and huge chains; a forest room with singing trees that sung when caressed by the artificial wind; six temples; an upside down room; a hololibrary; pill and sim rooms; novelty rooms; gift shops and two floors filled with living sculptures of angry Japanese gods and demons.

  The elevator stopped at a black VIP door, chiseled with hard silver script. The script sizzled like burning fat and the door broke apart, a puzzle disassembling itself. It opened on a long, red-carpeted hallway that swept towards colossal arched doors covered in Cantonese characters.

  A female dwarf in a tiny bikini and carrot-beaked mask said, “This way, Detectives,” in a voice like honey.

  She pirouetted and started down the hall, rolling like a penguin, the men following. Suddenly, she stopped and waved her hand at the wall. A glowing door appeared.

  “You can’t go home again,” she sang and snapped her fingers. The door burst open and she waved them in.

  They stepped inside and started to move. The door popped open and the hallway was gone, replaced by a low-lit Tuscan room with an elevated canopy bed, trimmed with gold lace. Crammed in everywhere were cops, hovering forensic balls, and organic camera drones. There were muddy footprints everywhere.

  Hoskin burst out of the elevator. “Who made these prints?”

  A nervous cop with a twitchy lip flipped around. He had the elongated face of the Ando Phyle.

  “Lieutenant?” said Twitchy.

  “I said, who made these fucking prints and fucked up this goddamn crime scene?” said Hoskin.

  The kid looked at his feet. “I—I don’t know, sir.”

  “Well find out, and get every cop who is contaminating my crime scene out of this room now.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Twitchy, who darted away.

  The bedroom spilled into a massive, open living room surrounded by giant, cathedral-style windows. Priceless imported paintings from the Hydra art movement of the early 2200s rearranged themselves on the ceiling, changing depending on who looked at them. Butter-soft leather couches circled a stone dipping pool with a nubile, golden-balled boy spouting water in its center.