The sky above Waterloo Bridge was devoid of stars and spitting acid rain. The pools of rain water on the asphalt reflected a kaleidoscopic film of mystery chemicals. It mirrored the state of Caldwell’s mind. He tried to focus his thoughts on the dead hacker Glyph. It was hard to believe that the hacker had betrayed him, for a pittance no less. What an absolutely pointless way to die.
He had to find Kat, the only human that could pass as a friend, to say goodbye. She’d be crushed if she found out that he’d left the Union without letting her know. And he wasn’t going to die without doing that. Although they made contact very rarely recently, Caldwell had been too busy trying to make a living, a strong unbreakable bond existed between them. It went beyond the bounds of friendship, family or amorous relationships.
They had met in the back alleys of Waterloo at a time when Caldwell had no memories to speak of and he was besieged by migraines that were so intense that he frequently blacked out from the pain. Kat had found him one rainy day unconscious on the concrete floor of one of the dark dripping pedestrian tunnels. Above his still body a cacophony of vehicles and the sound of shoes pounding asphalt. Pedestrians no longer ventured below to the bridge’s underground walkways out of a not totally irrational fear for their personal safety.
She’d half dragged and half carried him to the discarded photocopier box that formed the basis of her home. Half an hour later he had regained consciousness and they’d become acquainted, awkwardly, amid the homeless squalor of cardboard underneath this very bridge that loomed dark and mysterious in front of him. Kat was the first memory that Caldwell formed that involved another human being and they had forged between them an inexplicable bond that went beyond the fact that she had rescued him.
After his ride in the limo, he now knew a lot more about how he had got to the cardboard sprawl. It was a road to destruction paved by the man in the big black limousine who called himself Fouler and by the organization he represented. An organization he himself used to be part of that coldly spat him out into the dereliction of Waterloo. He would make them pay.
High above, Maglevs decelerated into Waterloo station, their livery flashing brilliantly between the trapezoid steel lattices of Waterloo Bridge, vibrations rumbling through the concrete. The station itself was a hulking glass monolith backlit by powerful spotlights that shot pure white light up at the night sky. The drizzle gave the lights a heraldic hue. Across the cityscape the glimmering lights of affluent living rooms blinked in the night.
“I was part of the system once,” Caldwell muttered under his breath. “I was part of the system.” He swiped the raindrops from his jacket. Luckily the knapsack had a waterproof lining and the synthetic leather did a good job of keeping water out.
Caldwell trudged through oil slick rain puddles towards the end of the bridge. His heart quickened with anticipation of what he would find in Hong Kong, the city of his birth. He was going there tomorrow. All this didn’t make much sense. Things were happening too quickly. What did that city hold for him besides remnants of lost memories? Would Hong Kong rekindle some past affection for the place?
The memories triggered by Fouler were crystal-clear in his mind, kept in sharp focus by an acute desire to remember. Caldwell’s mind had been transformed from drab landscapes of gray to black interlaced with the bright neons of the Far East. He could see them now, the glowing lights of a city whose shiny illuminated buildings were constantly reaching for the sky. Humanity upon humanity piled one atop the other, separated only by a thin layer of concrete and steel and the trappings of interior decoration. He tried to anticipate the memories that would be triggered by the lone card in the envelope in his back pocket, resisting the urge to look at it right there and then. Fouler had given it to him as a bonus, a gesture of goodwill. Caldwell was deeply suspicious of that last gesture but he was also curious.
He looked at his watch, an aging Casio with a weak holographic display that had faded with time. It was almost 10.00PM. The corporate drones had long retired to their prefab units to wind down their New Year’s celebrations before another stab at conglomerate serfdom. Waterloo was like a ghost town after 9.00PM, except for the odd late worker trundling towards the station to catch the late expresses that shunted people around the vast expanse of the Union. The place was just too dangerous, bordering as it did the dark criminal zones of South East London.
At the far end of the bridge, hundreds of lights flickered as bridge dwellers warmed gnarled hands at fast fading makeshift fires. Caldwell climbed down a maintenance ladder by the side of the bridge. It was one he had used countless times before. He remembered climbing up and down this bridge with Kat, the Thames undulating darkly below them. They’d be heading to the swanky hotels of The Strand on what they called their dinner run or returning from one. On lucky nights they’d bring back hunks of smoked Norwegian salmon still in the foils but past their sell by dates. They had grown to not care about their homeless lifestyles. When you were living on the streets, salmon tasted good even when it was a little off. Eat the pink stuff not the gray rank-smelling strips. On bad nights they’d starve or feed on bits of left over fast food in crushed Styrofoam boxes. Now he was off to the Far East, a place he never imagined he’d be able to ever afford visiting.
Caldwell descended into a sea of cardboard, packing pallets and Styrofoam. These were the building materials of choice for bridge dwellers. Cardboard in the summer, Styrofoam in the winter, the latter reinforced with plastic fiber pallets and old Salvation Army blankets. Plastic fiber was good for any weather.
The sprawl of cardboard and Styrofoam that expanded before his eyes was at once familiar and alien. It seemed like the inhabitants were going up in the world. Dwellings were getting bigger and more aesthetic. Some even had multiple wings that you accessed through makeshift plastic tunnels made out of fused chemical barrels appropriated from the back lots of industrial and pharmaceutical concerns. In the distance Caldwell heard the blare of at least two or three radios, one tuned to some foreign channel.
Despite the larger makeshift dwellings, squalor and filth had returned with a vengeance and there was a distinct smell of stale vomit in the air. Caldwell started to wonder whether Kat had moved on. Since he’d traded his patch underneath the bridge for the faceless cubicle cities of the Union he had only contacted Kat when he was moving on to another destination. She didn’t like to stay in touch all the time, preferring to touch base only at what she considered nodal points in their lives.
She had spent one day with him at the Angel Capsule Hotel, the two of them squeezed into the tight niche of his claustrophobic capsule surfing cyberspace through the console monitor embedded in the plastic ceiling. She’d remarked on how relatively clean everything was before she became homesick for the space and freedom of the bridge. She had spent all her life there having been dumped in one of the tunnels as a baby. A young teenage couple sleeping rough had adopted her as their own until one night they had both died of an overdose from dodgy bargain basement amphetamines appropriated from the omnipresent drug pushers from Vladivostok. Since then, the inhabitants had taken turns taking care of her until she became a teenager and was able to fend for herself.
He moved briskly through the dank dripping corridors, past countless frost-deformed toes peeping out of cardboard flaps. Garishly painted fingernails lay limp on the damp concrete floors as the owner lay comatose in alcohol- or drug-induced sleep. He moved past overgrown hair matted down with misfortune. Tears welled up in his eyes as he thought about the months spent here with Kat and all the others, many of whom it seemed had moved on and disappeared into the far reaches of The Union.
As Caldwell made his way through the putrid gloom of cardboard hovels, part of him hoped she had done better for herself and the conflicted other hoped she was still here so he could see her once again. He took a right past a Styrofoam dwelling brown with age and dirt. Its owner had carved it into the shape of an igloo. A bottle of cheap Chinese rice wine lay at the igloo’s entrance. A hairy hand flopped limply next to it. Loud irregular snores suggested that the owner was asleep.
Caldwell’s heart quickened as he rounded the corner to the section under the bridge that he and Kat had called home. The steel ceiling above rumbled with the sound of more MagLevs approaching the station. This part of the homeless sprawl was much brighter. Someone had rigged a cable and a 100 watt bulb off the electric cables that fed power to the MagLev tracks above. The MagLev Corporation would not miss the siphoned electricity.
There were just two dwellings in this section. One was on the spot where Caldwell used to live. The other was Kat’s. The smell of old puke was no longer discernible. It had been replaced with some kind of incense. Kat and her new age stuff. Caldwell smiled knowingly to himself. He could feel her presence.
Caldwell lifted the flap of Kat’s cardboard abode and peeped inside. The interior was dotted with round amber globules of a jelly-like substance that emitted a faint light. The folding futon they’d both found at the back of IKEA was still there. On one side was an even larger Sim Film collection than she had before. Her movies were stacked ceiling-high to one side. A broken console, its innards torn open, lay on the floor. It looked like Kat, a self-confessed Luddite, was trying to build a computer.
A half-empty bottle of cheap sake sat next to a chipped Japanese tea cup. Her Sim Unit was tethered to the worn goggles, which flashed bursts of light on to the floor. Caldwell picked up the goggles and put them on. Some old movie starring somebody he’d never heard of. Kat’s Sim Film unit switched on and unattended meant only one thing. He crawled back out through the cardboard flap.
Caldwell walked to the far end of the tunnel and took a left turn. This section of the shelter was a lot brighter as it received light from gaps in the concrete where the new pedestrian walkways met the giant HoloDome VR Cinema. When the pedestrian tunnels were annexed by the homeless several decades earlier, the authorities had simply sidestepped the problem by building new brightly-lit covered walkways right above them. They had hired some psychologist to ensure that the walkways had few features that would make them attractive to the homeless. The see-through strips on the floor were designed to transform the occupied cardboard jungle below into some kind of human zoo.
The gigantic holographic cinema was situated smack bang in the middle of cardboard city but the fine people who could afford the full scenario holographic movies and the VR immersion accessed the HoloDome through the new glass walkways from Waterloo Station or from nearby corporate buildings. On their way there, they got to see, through the strips, how the less fortunate half lived, and they got to walk all over the homeless.
Caldwell scanned the edge of the dome and saw a small figure huddled at the top. He leaned his ear against the curved steel of the dome’s exterior. Caldwell heard the sound of ghosts speaking in muffled voices and music that sounded like it was coming from beneath his skin.
He walked round to the back of the dome to the maintenance shaft and started to climb. He got to the top and walked precariously round the edge of the dome till he was next to the little waif-like figure peering through the gaps between the shiny metal slats that made up the dome’s roof. A flicker of recognition flashed through her eyes, reflected against the slats but she didn’t turn her head. She simply grabbed his arm and kept looking through the slats. Caldwell peered into the dome.
The movie was being rendered in brilliant holographic detail from projectors inside the roof down on to the stage below. Even the buildings and cars in the street scene looked real. Some of the crowd wore VR goggles and were part of the cast, inside the movie. The others just watched. They sat like this for a while. Kat looked well. Her mousy blonde hair blew wet against his face in the drizzle. She was shivering slightly. Caldwell took off his jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. Her bony fingers clutched his arm even more tightly, eyes transfixed by the flickering images of the HoloDome.
***
Kat crawled on all fours into her makeshift home, wriggling like a recently unearthed worm frantically searching for the familiar depths of its burrow. Caldwell followed closely behind. Up till now, she hadn’t said a word. Caldwell knew it was her way of communicating the fact she’d missed him and he found in her silence a strange comfort. She poured two cups of sake and offered him one.
“It’s been a while,” she said, finally.
“Yeah. You’re looking well.”
“So are you,” she said awkwardly, raising her shoulder and jerking her head back in that signature gesture of hers. Caldwell had never understood what it meant but he figured that it approximated something close to excitement. Her voice had that strange surreal quality that Caldwell had never heard anywhere else, computer-generated or otherwise. Her face was streaked with gunk from the roof of the HoloDome. Her hair had grown a bit too long and needed a wash. In her eyes were reflected memories of a thousand movies.
“Things must be going well,” Caldwell said, nodding in the direction of the sake.
“Oh that? New high-end Japanese eatery on The Strand. Threw a whole bunch of stuff out back.”
“The Japanese are returning with a vengeance,” Caldwell said, thinking of the digitally rendered mask of Kenzo Yamamoto’s face.
“Sure seems that way. Lot’s of good flicks coming from out of there.”
Kat took movies more seriously than real life. It was her only passion, her one escape from the drudgery of reality.
“Look Kat, I am leaving the Union for a while. I am going to Hong Kong for a job.”
“Hong Kong? Can’t even begin to imagine what that’s like. In Hong Kong you can buy a murder for five bucks.” The theatrical way in which she uttered the last sentence told Caldwell that she was quoting from a movie as she invariably did when the occasion presented itself.
“Huh?”
“It’s from the movie Stingray.”
“Ah!” He’d never seen Stingray.
“If this was Hong Kong, you’d already be dead,” Kat continued.
“I know that one. Lethal Weapon. The fourth one, straight from the depths of sequel hell.”
“Yeah.” Her eyes sparkled when she talked about her favorite subject.
“So how did you manage to land this trip to Hong Kong?”
Caldwell told her everything from receiving the message from Glyph to Fouler’s appearance. He told her about his excitement at finding out he had a past and about his mother and how beautiful she looked in the photo. He conveniently left out talking about his close encounter with suicide. Her eyes tracked his face taking in everything he was saying and registering it with the felicity of the lens of a director’s camera. She didn’t so much listen to the story as picture it. He told her about Fouler and his offer. At that point her eyes narrowed like the aperture of an ancient mechanical camera.
“Can you trust him?” she asked. She had that uncanny ability to get to the crux of an issue quickly.
“I don’t know. Trust can kill you or set you free,” Caldwell quoted.
“The Pretender. And don’t think that will put me off the subject.”
“I think I’ll be OK.”
“It might be a trick.”
“Those bastards hold the key to my memory, to my past. This is the only way I can get that back.”
She looked at him and they made that inexplicable mental connection that tied them together. She looked away quickly and began toying with the gutted computer on the floor.
“Found this down on Fleet Street, discarded by one of the defunct broadsheets. There were hundreds of computers down there but most of the good stuff was gone. I think this one can be made to work.” Kat was changing the subject in her clumsy awkward way.
“Yeah,” Caldwell said. “If you start working in reverse and assemble rather than dismantle it.”
She laughed revealing a neat row of small white teeth. Her head arched back and her throat reverberated with sound. Small veins in her neck pulsated with life.
“Man is destructive by nature. Im sure that you will understand that I am going through a destructive phase.”
“Was that another quote?”
“Yeah. From Look Who’s Talking.”
“Cool!”
“Do you know why I got it?” she asked.
“No idea. I know you hate computers.”
“I wanted to keep in touch with you. To communicate in and understand your world.”
“Really? That’s so sweet. It’s not nearly as much fun as it seems,” Caldwell said, leaning forward and giving her a quick hug.
“Also, one of the guys here gave me a hacked password to the biggest online movie archive in the world. All the flicks ever made, including all the silent stuff.”
“I knew there had to be another reason.”
“I am hoping this piece of junk, when it’s up and running will let me access it. Do you think you could make it work for me?”
“It’ll take forever.”
“Really?”
“Yes, but I have a better idea. It’s about time you left this place, Kat. Why don’t I ask Fouler to let you move into Glyph’s mobile home until I get back? He probably has all the computer you’ll ever need.”
“Would love to Cad but there are two problems. I can’t afford his rent and the guys who killed him might go back to his place nosing around.”
“I am guessing they already have. As for the rent I’ll get my new benefactor to take care of it.”
“And they’ll agree just like that?”
“Definitely. I have something they need and it’s an insignificant expense for them.”
“Well, I do want to get out of here. I’m not going to pretend I am in love with this place, although the HoloDome is awfully convenient,’ she observed thoughtfully. Caldwell went in for the kill before she could change her mind.
“But you’ll have access to all the movies in the world from that site you mentioned and I once heard Glyph mention online that he has an amazing HoloFlik system.”
That did the trick. Kat’s eyes lit up with anticipation and he knew she was sold.
“Deal,” she said simply and started looking around her space. “I guess I just need some clothes and my Sims. Everything else I can leave here. Who knows, if your job doesn’t go as well as you expect, I might be coming back. You might be coming back.”
“True. We should go tonight as I would like to look around Glyph’s place before I go to the airport tomorrow,” Caldwell said. He didn’t plan on coming back to this eclectic jungle of cardboard, no matter how nostalgic he felt. The fact that Fouler had given him his last chance to answer life-changing questions and a shot at coming out of darkness was not lost on him. Neither was the fact that he still owed the agency man no favors. Kat started methodologically packing her Sims into a pale green duffel bag, while Caldwell watched her. Ten minutes later, she was all ready to go.
“Anyone you need to say goodbye to?”
“Not really. Anybody that matters is long gone.”
“I hate to interrupt this moment of burgeoning intimacy, but lets get the hell out of here,” Caldwell said, quoting a line from Deep Blue Sea. He was no movie buff but once in a while he scored big. Kat’s neat features broke into an appreciative smile.