• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 330 0

and it was still predominantly a place where you came to eat, drink, or have a good time. Whatever the focus of your sexual inclination, you can go to the 8th floor and watch it dancing on a very small stage. You can also score recreational quantities of pretty much whatever you want, without danger of being caught in a firestorm. Most of it is only one story high, and they keep the ceiling lights off, relying on orange street lamps which run along either side of the thoroughfares. If you don’t check the corners too closely the floor has a kind of lopsided charm, like a run-down but cheery portion of some European capital, or the Old Quarter of New Orleans. The ceiling is covered in creepers and foliage, making the roads feel like paths in a forest. Forests usually give me The Fear, but I like 8, and always have. It’s full of neon, autumn jazz, the smell of good food and, for some reason, the feeling that it has just stopped raining. It never has, of course, but it always feels that way to me.

I walked quickly down the center of the street, noticing what was new and what remained. The streets were quiet but music slunk out of most of the open doors, buoying up the desultory strippers who swayed on tabletops. A few down-and-outs sat on street corners, stuck in main() with their handleMouseDown() mitts held out, but from the look of them I didn’t think anyone’s cursor was ever going to find them. It’s an image problem, I think. Maybe they should all club together and hire a PR consultant, put out a few TV ads, find some way of making begging seem cool. I’m sure there’s money to be made in it somewhere.

I had to be out of here quickly, but I wanted to make my last visit right. I stopped at one corner to catch a few minutes from a news post, just like I always used to. New Richmond has a twenty-four-hour local events feed on every corner. Flatscreen monitors hang like banners wherever you go, twisting and turning to foist information on the unwary public as they approach. It helps the upper floors think they know what’s going on. They don’t, of course, but they spend so much time talking about the twenty per cent the news covers that no one even guesses at all the rest.

Arlond Maxen had opened a new school on 190, I learned. Big fucking deal. The people who lived that high had so much money they had to be sedated every morning to stop them going berserk with glee. The only floors richer than 190 to 200 were the ones built on top of the MegaMall—all owned by Arlond Maxen himself, the de facto king of the heap. In the news footage, Maxen looked the same as he always had: distant, a man who was always the other side of an LCD panel or cathode tube. It was sometimes hard to believe that he was anything more than a pattern, of lights, moving across the face of New Richmond, always at one remove.

The next item said that Chief of Police McAuley was lobbying to relocate people out of 100 and fill it with concrete, to finally stop the plebs from accessing the higher floors. Cunning, I thought, and never mind that the real lowlife have fuck-off great houses on 185. The C of P in New Richmond is one of the world’s premier dickheads, and also one of the best kickback receivers in the country. Never known to fumble a play.

The new hobby for the young and stupid was wall-diving: jumping out of upper-story windows without a rope or parachute. And some woman had got psychoed and spread over twenty square yards of 92: the murderer had wrought “unspecified damage to her face,” and the cops were hopeful of an early arrest. Yeah, right.

Nothing much had changed.

Passing all the food stands wasn’t easy. The one thing Ratchet hadn’t been able to cook properly was burgers, and after five years I’d almost turned the idea of them into a religion. I took a turn off Main and walked some side streets until I reached the place I was going. The sign outside had been made bigger and more ostentatious, but apart from that, the bar looked exactly the same. I stood outside for a moment, looking past the wooden window frames, stained deep brown with polish,