Metrophage | Page 3

of the Iron Orchid.
As Jonny crossed Sunset, a few of the Sisters waved to him. When he waved back, a gust of wind pulled open his tunic, revealing his Futukoro Automatic. The Sisters whooped and laughed at the sight of the weapon, feigning terror. A tall Sister with Maori facial tattoos crooked her finger and began blasting him with an imaginary gun.
Coming toward him from the opposite direction was a ring of massive Otoko Niku. Meat Boys--uniformly ugly acromegalic giants, each easily three meters tall. In the center of the protective ring, an old Yakuza oyabun openly stared and pointed at people. It was rare enough for people to see a pure-blood Japanese in the street that they stopped to stare back, until the Meat Boys cuffed them away. Jonny thought of a word then.
Gaijin. Foreigner. Alien.
That's me. I'm gaijin, Jonny thought. He could find little comfort in the familiarity of the streets. Jonny realized that by acknowledging his desire to kill Easy Money, he had cut himself off from everybody around him. He walked slower. Twice he almost turned back.
A tiny nisei girl tried to sell him a peculiar local variation on sushi--refried beans and raw tuna wrapped in a corn husk--commonly known as Salmonella Roll. Jonny declined and ducked into an alley. There, he swallowed two tabs of Desoxyn, hijacked from a Committee warehouse.
It was good stuff. Very soon, a tingling began in his finger-tips and moved up his arms, filling him with a pleasantly tense, almost sexual, energy. Beads of sweat broke out on his hands and face, ran down his chest. He thought of Sumi.
"I might not be back tonight," he had told her before he left the squat they shared. "Uno tareja. Got some deliveries to make," he lied. Routine stuff."
"Then why are you taking that blunderbuss?" Sumi asked, pointing to the Futukoro pistol Jonny had hidden under his tunic.
Jonny ignored her question and tried to look very interested in the process of lacing up his steel-tipped boots. Sumi terrified him. Sometimes, in his more callous moments, he considered her a slip-up, his one remaining abandonment to emotional ties. Occasionally, when he felt strong, he would admit to himself that he loved her.
"I'll be passing through the territories of a dozen gangs tonight and then if I'm lucky I'll be landing in Carnaby's Pit. That's why the blunderbuss," he said. "I should be taking a Committee battalion with me."
"I bet they'd be thrilled if you called them."
"I bet you're right."
Almond-eyed Sumi stroked his hair with delicate, callused hands. He had met her at the zendo of an old Buddhist nun. The Zen study had not stuck, but Sumi had. Her full name, Sumimasen, meant variously, thank you," I'm sorry," and this never ends." She had been on her own almost as long as Jonny. Along the way, she picked up enough electronics to make her living as a Watt Snatcher; That is: for a fee she would tap right into the government's electric lines under the city and siphon off power for her customers.
Jonny got up and Sumi put her arms around him, thrusting her belly at the pistol in his belt. "Is that your gun or are you just happy to see me?" Sumi asked. She did a whole little act, rolling her eyes and purring in her best vamp voice. But her nervousness was obvious.
Jonny bent and kissed the base of her neck, held her long enough to reassure, then longer. He felt her tense up again, under his hands.
"I'll be back," he said.
During the last few months, Jonny had begun to worry about leaving Sumi alone. Officially, the government's power lines did not exist. All the more reason the State would like to wipe the Watt Snatchers out. All the gangs were outlaws, technically. The elements of the equation were simple: its components were the price of survival divided by the risks that survival demanded. And in an age of rationing and manufactured shortages, survival meant the black market. The gangs produced whatever the smuggler lords couldn't bring in. And the pushers sold it on the streets.
Jonny had chosen his own brand of survival when he walked away from the Committee for Public Health and threw in with the pushers. It was a simple question of karma. Now he worked the black market, selling any drugs the smuggler lords could supply--anti-biotics, LSD analogs, beta-endorphins, MDMA, skimming the streets on a razor-sharp high compounded of adrenaline and paranoia.
In his more philosophical moments, it seemed to Jonny that they were all engaged in nothing more than some bizarre battle of symbols. What the smuggler lords and gangs provided--food, power and drugs--had become the ultimate symbols of control in their world. The Federales could not afford to ease up their rationing of medical treatment, access