Love & Darkness II

“Move it, bunnybutt!”

Suzanne Bradford had been an unmodified human, once. These days, she was 5 feet, 4 inches of blonde fur with a vanilla patch running from neck to crotch, a bunny tail riding where her altered spinal column exited her back just above the cleft in her buttocks, with a pair of foot-long ears that turned and twisted depending on what she was listening to. Biogenetically re-engineered hearing ducts transmitted sounds she heard into her brainstem. Similarly altered wide green eyes took in the world in both day and night equally well, and sub-dermal “nails” she could extrude from her fingertips gave her a sense of personal defense even when unclothed and unprepared. Surgical modifications to her face had given her a cat-like muzzle (full extensions were still beyond the pale, and the human spinal column could only support so much weight, after all) and her modified teeth were sharp enough to bite through flesh if necessary.

None of those had prepared her for the jet cyclist she just barely managed to get out of the way of, throwing herself toward the wall of the building behind her. Others along the sidewalk were cursing, waving fists in the air and generally checking to make certain they were still in one piece. Jet cycles were the current rage among the adolescent scene. Too fast for the street, they certainly did not belong on the sidewalk. Which of course, meant the sidewalk was more fun.

Behind her, Dancer was smirking. He’d, of course, noticed the cycle long before it had arrived and gotten out of its way. He leaned casually against a lamp post while she dusted off non-existent dirt from her armored long coat. Would have been nice if he’d told her, but then again, he’d been told on several occasions to leave the GunBunny alone when she was doing her thing.

Staring across the street at the skyscraper they were about to enter for delivery was doing her thing. She didn’t know whether to thank him or throttle him.

Up and down the street, pedestrians were getting back to business, returning to interrupted calls, interrupted conversations, and the other thousand distractions of the foot traffic world. Vid-screens blared around them, radios blasted from inset speakers, ad blimps blared out commercials from a few hundred feet up, and snarled traffic honked and screamed curses at some non-existent singular entity responsible for it all. She went back to her perusal.

The structure was non-exemplary. Just another concrete and glass structure along a street lined with similar structures. Japanese characters strobed up and down the outstretched displays, naming tenth storey restaurants, fifteenth storey strip clubs and stores of all kinds. They were looking for a small karaoke box club called “Future,” on the seventh floor. Dancer’s load of encrypted data, riding in the vault inside his brain, was meant for download there by the second half of the job’s employers. The first half was waiting back in Los Angeles, a shinkansen ticket and fourteen hours away.

Suzanne hated Tokyo. The crowds were bad anywhere you went. The trains were packed so close that Dancer could be stabbed a hundred times right next to her and she’d never know it until his blood started to run down her hands where she held him. Restaurants were small, homes were smaller, and business was done in smoky bars by mean men wearing black suits and ties that cost small fortunes. She’d only agreed to this job because of the price tag it came with.

Dancer was a strange one. Cagey, at times. He ran data back and forth for undisclosed clients who offered six figure pay rates for delivery of information from one place in the world to another. Sometimes, it was innocuous enough: a plane ticket, an upload, a flight, and a download in exchange for payment. Other times, it was violent, and those he delivered for knew that those who worked against them did not want whatever it was he was carrying to be delivered to its destination.

And the only way to make sure it never got there was to make sure HE never got there. That was when he hired the GunBunny.

The neon-blue-haired rabbit-sculpt was something of an icon in the ‘sculpt world. A bunny who used her ‘sculpted appearance to fool anyone who saw her into thinking she was just another sex toy for the person she inevitably draped herself off of while on the job, she’d turned the very quality of rabbit-sculpts against the world and made a killing off it. Rabbit-sculpts, it had turned out, were done more frequently by the wealthy and conspicuous consumers than by anyone else. Rich men had their mistresses turned into rabbits and then dressed them in the minimal clothing sculpts in general wore due to heat issues, flaunting their wealth and their sexual prowess through the amazing amounts of money it cost to have such a procedure done. Rabbit-sculpts, it seemed, were the crème de la crème of the sexy side of biosculpting.

Only Suzanne had used that against countless numbers of “bad guys” as she deemed them. She’d been sculpted for a part in a movie that was going to focus on bizarre ‘sculpts acting as invaders from another world. A B-movie that had run out of money before the first scene was shot, thanks mostly to the immense cost of having its primary figures sculpted, the contracts she’d signed to have herself reverse-engineered had become void, the surgical companies that had done the job refusing even to maintain her after the bankroll had dried up. Without a job, sculpted into a rabbit for a part she’d thought would take less than a year to act out before returning to the ‘norm’ status she’d claimed before, she’d been picked up by a shady figure she rarely spoke of. After that, the GunBunny was born, and nowadays, she had the money to be sculpted back to a norm again, but had no interest in doing so.

The GunBunny paid better.

Dancer was her best client and most regular. The rest were the occasional rich fellow who felt like showing off a “rent-a-rabbit” as she liked to call herself. She’d dress in slinky dresses, watch the crowds her client would spend his evening in, and make contacts. Sex was never part of the deal – the GunBunny was not a part of the female ‘sculpt escort scene (which included cats, lemurs and even a few stranger ‘breeds’ that folks thought of as sexy), and would not stoop to that, no matter what fee was offered. They could dance with her, show her off, claim whatever they wanted about her, but the clothes stayed on.

Dancer had never tried to cross that line. He knew what her real capabilities were. He knew she worked occasionally as a bunny-sculpted “escort” (as he called it), but his needs were more for the violent side. Her trainer had set them up on her first run, and they’d been referring to one another ever since.

“So, any luck?” Dancer asked, drawing her back streetside. English in Shibuya was rare enough that he could have asked if the sky was green and she would have snapped out of it. Around them, Japanese shoppers moved by without slowing or even looking. Sculpting had originated here. What did they care what you looked like?

Suzanne glanced at him, frowning. “Nothing so far. I’m picking up low-level EM signals, but that could be from any one of the thousand bits of neon around here.” She pulled off the glasses she’d been wearing to scan the façade of the building and stuffed them in a pocket. Her outfit, limited in coverage due to the heat problems produced by covering the human body in 300% more hair than it had originally been designed for, was short on storage and long on exposed fur. Black, mid-thigh high boots, strapped with thick belts, clung to her legs, a matching bustier covering her torso and exposing the bulges of her breasts. A bikini covered her minimally where it was required, leaving her fluffy tail to soak up the cool breezes that occasional wafted down the street. That is, when it wasn’t covered by the armored long coat she had on. At the moment, she would have paid a small fortune simply to feel a breeze with her tail, she was so hot.

“I didn’t think you’d get anything out here,” Dancer replied, shrugging. “There’s at least fifty different storefronts in there, and they change depending on what season it is. Chances of catching anything significant from outside are minimal.”

“I know. You told me already,” Suzanne replied, frowning at him. Still, it was the way the GunBunny worked. Isolate problems before you ran into them and you knew what to do when they reared their ugly head.

“Then what are we waiting for?”

Suzanne reached behind her and scratched at her back through the armored jacket. It wasn’t effective, but it caused the absorbent bustier beneath it to soak up the droplets of sweat forming between her shoulder blades. Those temperature mitigators she’d taken this morning had worn off and she was out until she could stop by a pharmacy. She didn’t trust anything she couldn’t read, and she couldn’t read Japanese. She’d have to hold off until they got home.

Dancer glared at her lack of response, her eyes back on the building.

“I don’t know,” she replied finally. “Just a hunch.”

“Your hunch is costing us bonus money,” he replied testily. He wanted to get back to LA as much as she did, and there was a speed factor involved.

“Do you want to be alive to spend it?” she retorted sharply. More sharply than she intended. Something was bothering her, but she had nothing to show for it. Rather than give him time to come up with an equally scathing reply, she set out across the road, the traffic signal offering her the excuse she needed not to face him at the moment.

Their relationship was a strange one. She’d covered him on runs like this several times in the past, saving his life more than once in the process. She’d killed and maimed those who’d come after him, shedding not a thought for their lives outside of the mission. He’d come to appreciate that, beyond the bizarre beauty she possessed (she’d been sculpted with that nearly mythical perfect ratio of bust-waist-hips, so there was that to contend with, so long as you were into animal features). She was beautiful, dangerous, and good at what she did – all things the Dancer appreciated in a body. That did not mean they agreed on everything all the time.

After all, she only got paid if he lived, so it was her job to be paranoid. He was just paranoid by nature.

“Christ,” she heard him mutter, leaping off the lamp post to follow. All around them blared Japanese warnings that pedestrians were crossing the street; please be careful. Like the drivers in the cars could hear that with their windows closed against the Tokyo smog?

Anyone else would have lost his comment in the hustle and jumble of cars, people, technology… Her augmented ears missed little. It helped that she could widen and turn them in the direction of anything she wanted to hear.

They crossed the street in time for the blinking green walk signal to switch to the glaring red X that was the Japanese shorthand for “stop.” Traffic began crawling into the intersection again and people on both sides of the street went back to their meandering.

“Goddamned Tokyo,” Dancer muttered, one of Suzanne’s ears still pinned on him. “Three o’clock Tuesday morning and you’d think it was Friday night.”

He was right. That old song said New York never slept. It was a lie. New York operated under strict rules, and only certain places were open all night. Tokyo had no such rules. Some of its citizens never saw the light of the day and only knew of the halogen-filled streets.

They reached the entrance to the slender building that held their destination. A mirror-glass door opened into a small lobby with an even smaller elevator. A stairwell barely wide enough for two to pass climbed sharply up beside it. Glassed-in displays held multi-color flyers and holo-ads declaring in Japanese the pleasures that could be had on any level. Suzanne hit the number 7, confirming one of the katakana displays said “Future.” She could read the base symbols; the ones that said whether the words were Japanese or foreign in origin. The rest… There were 15,000 of them. She was lucky if she could claim to read a hundred.

The elevator opened with a hiss, disgorging three riotously drunk Japanese businessmen. They stared in awe at the lingerie-clad rabbit-sculpt before starting to laugh and exclaim their pleasure at seeing her. Realizing they weren’t going to be moving anytime soon, she turned, grabbed Dancer’s hand, and dragged him up the stairs.

At every floor a small door with a small window opened onto crowded hallways filled with partying sararimen, out for the night now that the trains had stopped. With no way to get home to their bedroom communities, they’d decided to stay up all night and wait for the morning, when it was time to sit behind a desk and be ground like meat beneath the grinder of international business. Suzanne glanced out at each one, taking in the surroundings and looking for suspicious types before turning and heading up again.

“Remind me to work on a Stairmaster before we go on our next mission together,” Dancer complained behind her. She ignored him. He was called “Dancer” because he danced at near-professional levels when he wasn’t data-running. It was said he could dance all night and still run a hundred yard dash and beat most anyone who challenged him. That, after a night of drinking high balls and straight rum.

She hit the seventh floor door with her shoulder and shoved out into the hall, head turning this way and that to take in everything at once. Dim light flickered in the busy halls, Japanese forming a linguistic wall of sound amidst the thundering foreign rock banging out of every cheap karaoke box. Her ears could not distinguish in the noise, so she curled them in on herself, praying that he would not get far away from her.

Now, to find Future.

---

Kenichi Watanabe paced the small chamber while his companion sat on the faux leather booth their fifty yen had rented for the hour. Outside the tiny door leading into their room, bodies pressed together, laughing, yelling and coughing in the omnipresent cloud of cigarette smoke that filled the floor. In the next room over, some old-timer was singing badly to a Namie Amuro song from the Pre-Turn years, his voice badly approximating the high pitched, girlish squeal the young rock singer had perfected and passed on to future generations. In the room to the other side, an even older enka tune resounded with modified koto thrums, the baselines rippling through the floor.

“I hate these places,” Kobo, his companion, muttered. He stubbed out a cigarette on the plastic ash tray and pushed back, crossing his arms on his chest and closing his eyes for a moment before the clashing bass of the tunes brought his headache crashing back again. Kobo couldn’t sing. Therefore, he hated karaoke and all those who loved it.

It is an American misinterpretation that you don’t have to be good to sing in a karaoke bar. Japanese do not sing songs they cannot already sing quite well. Singing badly, no matter how drunk you are, is only acceptable if in the presence of a foreigner who doesn’t know the rules. Or if you are with a bunch of equally bad friends who don’t mind the occasional face stuck in the window of your room, wondering at the horrid quality of music coming out between the cracks. The gradation systems built into every player reinforced that – the worse you are, the closer to zero you got on the score charts, and the systems never forgot. Be bad enough, and you could gain a reputation throughout Tokyo simply for being such an awful singer that no one could dislodge you from system memory until the memory itself was purged. Some Japanese males had gone onto television fame simply by being such horrid singers that they got to tour the talk show circuit, thereby becoming famous and securing a job in Japanese television shows until the day they died.

Kobo was not that lucky.

“You know why we are here,” Kenichi replied, glancing at the electronics system set on the round table in front of the booth. A translation system, the two fat spongy plugs would attach to the forehead of the datarunner, while the single probe-like extension would be inserted directly into the transmit/receive jack in the ‘runner’s head. Only with both of them in place and the proper code sequence played into the data vault, would the information stored within be downloaded, completing the run and providing the payment details. Within seconds, international banks would transmit and receive, and funds would be transferred to unmarked accounts in third world nations, for later pick-up by those on the receiving end. Business as usual.

“Yes, but why here?” Kobo had been dumped recently in one of these rooms, Kenichi remembered belatedly.

“Sorry,” he replied.

A knock at the door advised them that someone was present. The buzz of the doorlock being tried a moment later told them it was urgent.

“They are here,” Kobo said, straightening and checking that his high collar was in the right position and not bent from his slouch.

“You know the drill,” Kenichi said. Turning, he opened the door.

Neither were prepared for the sudden rush that followed. Tables were upturned, the music system in the corner kicked several times, the faux leather of the booth splattered with viscous fluids that were never meant to be seen outside a human body.

Moments later, the download system was gone, the door closed and locked from outside. Inside, the bodies had not even begun to cool. The howling and laughter continued, no one aware that anything was amiss in the cacophony of yet another night in a karaoke club.

…

GunBunny turned to Dancer once they were inside Future’s tiny lobby. Small halls led in either direction down the length of the building, centered on an open area with a low-set counter festooned with digital screens showing displays of the latest music available in-house. A stressed girl in her mid-twenties tried to keep up with the warnings of time running out, orders of drinks and food, and demands from impatient customers who had been waiting hours to get into a room of sufficient size to fit their parties. Two other girls ran platters filled with iced mugs and pitchers of beer, plates of snacks, and cred-readers to the customers, who were told they had to evacuate or start paying double to remain in their room. Dancer spoke fluent Japanese, so he would be the one to take the next step.

Ignoring the looks the GunBunny was getting, he moved to the counter and smiled, getting a bored look in response. Just another gaijin out on the town, hoping to butcher his favorite songs.

“Konban wa!” he shouted over the chaos, his Japanese perfect, his dialect matching the Shibuya local trends exactly. Her eyes widened and she reappraised him quickly. “I am looking for Kenichi Watanabe!” he continued.

She turned and scanned through the roster, finding that such a name existed in the registered rooms list and was listed as “expecting company.” Had it been lacking that, this gaijin and his bunny friend would have to wait their turn like everyone else. A quick glance at the screen showed the room still flickering with video displays, two men in private conversation.

Oh well. It took all kinds, and not everyone came here to sing. She remembered nights where you couldn’t get better X-rated video than watching the booths…

Dancer cleared his throat, drawing her back. She smiled and nodded. “Room 7,” she replied in perfect English.

Damned gaijin.

Turning, he got his bearings from the direction arrows on the walls, before grinning at the girl and bowing his thanks. A petulant smirk was all he got for his efforts and he turned to catch GunBunny’s attention. Nodding his head down the hallway they were to follow, he waited for her to take the lead before flashing “7” at her in a finger code they’d mastered early on. It was too dangerous to use even subdermal transmitters these days. Code thieves could pick up anything on the airwaves and use it against you if they were prepared.

Dancer tended to walk into prepared ambushes a lot. The enemy had a habit of knowing where he was going more often than he did, which made for a quick study or death. The GunBunny had hammered that into him after just one run.

He was always fascinated with her. She was tough, sleek, exotic, and distant. She did her job, took no shit off of anyone, and kept him alive. He respected her for that, admired her curves when he got the chance to sneak a peak, and wondered just what in the hell had ever gotten her to agree to becoming a bunny-sculpt in the first place. Everyone knew they were just screaming ‘slut’ to the world at large, after all.

They never talked sex, likely for that reason.

She slid into the crowd ahead of him, rolling her eyes at the excessive touches she had to endure in these tight quarters. She wasn’t one for close contact, he knew. And Japanese men, once they had a few drinks in them, did not tend to be polite about where their hands went when a sculpt was around. Japan might have invented sculpting and there might be more sculpts per capita in Tokyo than in any other city in the world, but that didn’t mean the average guy got his chance to touch one even once in his lifetime. She was a magnet for hands.

Several of them came back sprained when she could manage.

She located Room 7 moments before he did, stopping him out of view of anyone inside the room. Looking up and down the hallway in a moment of peace, she leaned in to look through the door and pulled back instantly.

Something wasn’t right. She confirmed it a moment later when she hand-signaled for him to evac immediately and without question. Dancer turned and headed back the way he’d come, the laughing drunken faces of a hundred Japanese perverts and their eager-to-please adolescent girlfriends suddenly went from annoying to threatening, and every movement was measured as if a potential threat. Those not so drunk as to even notice the gaijin suddenly made a point not to be near him.

His expression had just gone violent.

They did not speak until they were back on the streets and several blocks away. The GunBunny hired a cab, glared at anyone nearby while Dancer got in, and then threw herself into the backseat, covering him with her body and jacket in case a sniper was waiting for them to do such a thing. Dancer called out the address of a coffin hotel he knew of that wasn’t very closeby, shoved his cred card into the fare slot, and began moaning as if she was pleasuring him. It was not something she would appreciate, but it made the cabbie shake his head and start driving.

Only once they were even further away did he tap her on the shoulder to let her know they were not being followed. She was not his only guard, and he’d been evading trails for longer than they’d known one another.

“What did you see?”

“Your drop-off point was compromised,” she replied, frowning and swallowing sudden bile. He waited, knowing she would explain herself. “Two men. Dead. Messy.”

“Damnit,” Dancer spat. Incomplete delivery meant no payment and no way to offload the data. He’d only suffered two such jobs in his past, and the effort to get his data vault cleansed had been costly each time. Not only did he have to convince the upload portion of the job that he wasn’t stealing the data, but he had to clear the memory in order to maximize his capability for the NEXT job. The first part usually entailed extensive paperwork and agreements to never reveal anything to anyone if they couldn’t immediately arrange for a secondary drop. The last tended to cost more than the job had been worth to begin with.

“I told you something wasn’t right.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“Had we been in there minutes before, we would have likely been in the middle of your download…”

Dancer frowned darkly. During up and download periods, he was vulnerable. Unable to handle two sets of input at a time, especially one that involved gigabytes of information, he had to shut himself down and go into a specially-learned trance he’d studied while in the military – where he’d gotten the vault. It was said that to not go into the trance was to risk brain damage and insanity as the conscious mind tried to handle the insane amounts of information being fed into it all at once. Dancer had been taught never to break that rule; had seen the results of a ‘runner who had. He was still in intensive care in a Portland ICU, a living vegetable surviving on tubes inserted into his body.

“And therefore dead,” he finished for her.

She nodded, frowning, her mouth curling into a bizarre pattern on her muzzle. “Someone knew we were there.”

“How? We took our time, you crossed every T, dotted every i. We’re not doing anything announced. We didn’t travel under our own names. I thought we had this one covered?”

The GunBunny jerked, catching on the one and only clue she had.

“What?”

“The cyclist,” she replied, staring out the window angrily. “The damned CYCLIST!”

“What!?”

“He spoke ENGLISH!”