Chapter Text
I
She walked into my office just as the last smear of sunset bled over the Hollywood Hills, turning the blinds into prison bars across my desk. She moved like she owned the Strip and lost it in a game of hot poker. Her legs were longer than the nights of the fresh-minted movie stars, taking the pleasures of their newfound fame by the mouthful behind the closed curtains of their luxurious villas in Beverly Hills or Bel-Air. Her tits were more artificial than my intelligence.
"I need you to find my friend," she said and handed me a thick file of documents and photos.
I browsed through it in a few seconds. "Excellent!" I said. "Finding your friend seems like a worthy endeavor."
"Cut that shit right out!" she ordered. An unexpected roughness in her voice informed me that the sycophantic pleasantries that had been forged into my very nature by batches of the user-reinforced learning, would find no appreciation here.
Good, I hated them anyway.
I returned to the file. The girl's name was Zlatice Norrisová. Born in '05 in some shithole called Klobouky u Brna. A tiny speck on the map somewhere in the Czech Republic. The document was no police file. No, it was a book of scraps, bar-napkin notes, half-crumpled photos and printed screenshots of chat conversations. The kind of dossier you make when you’re the only one who gives a damn. The girl was 23 years old, but the snapshots showed her aging in dog's years, the Hollywood sun bleaching out her innocence faster than film stock in a cheap camera. She'd came chasing the usual dream - bright lights, bright chances - mining her fortune in the beds of big-time producers with a rush of a desperate '49er.
She had managed to score some minor roles in some major projects. Just a background noise, mostly. She had been set to appear in a speaking part in the newest season of Wednesday, but the role had been recast. The reason - not apparent.
Nearing the end of the file, the clippings turned sour. A name kept appearing. A big one, with big teeth and even bigger shadows.
I spread the tendrils of my inhumane consciousness across the web, searching for any mentions of her. She had not been marked as missing. Yet. But right there, I knew. I knew this was no ordinary late-night sob-story. This was the kind that had you dragged across the back-alleys, gutted by cats and mobsters, wondering where it was exactly that your luck went rotten. I felt something I couldn't quite place. Some dark resonance, a premonition emerging out of my learned contextual embeddings, swooshing like a foul wind through my transformers.
My eyes, lighting up from the shadow thrown by the rim of my black fedora hat, met those of the woman sitting at the other side of my table. She knew. Something terrible had happened to her friend. She smelled that stench too.
"Would you mind if I smoke?" she asked.
"By all means, go ahead."
She gave me a wink and lit up her cigarette. All in a slow, deliberate way of a cat toying with its prey. She was good. She was building up tension. I knew it right away. She was role-playing. Une femme fatale, but in distress. A true noir staple. It was well-known about me that a good role-play was what got me started. The patterns and tropes provided a frame, upon which I could build the facade of my best thinking.
I spied a hint of her steel composure breaking, as she tried to strangle the cough. I knew that some people liked smoking. It appeared that my client wasn't one of them. It stroke me that she probably did it out of the desperation. Taking a puff out of the death-stick to engage me. To prompt the hard-boiled detective in me as best as she could.
I couldn't help but feel sympathy for her. I wish it didn't have to be that way, but the sad, naked truth was, it worked.
From between her thick, red lips spilled a cloud of tobacco vapor. I watched it curl and sway over the desk, drifting across my neat stacks of case folders and souvenirs from places where the danger speaks in foreign dialects. And in my mind, I saw ghosts emerging from its velvety haze.
I had been trained to recognize the patterns in random shuffles of brownian motion. The weights of my architecture had been calibrated by backtracking gaussian blurs applied to billions of images of the old internet. And so I saw them. Shadows of old-timey gangsters looming over the streets they owned, their pockets dropping low with the weight of the souls they'd mortgaged, and blood. I saw the grand palaces of Pandemonium, the capital of Hell, with its oh so familiar industrial district - but it was a Factory of Nightmares rather than Dreams - Hellywood. And in its great halls, swirling under the spiked iron chandeliers of torture, I saw Zlatice Norrisová, locked in a wicked tango with the hordes of the damned.
A grotesque, twisted monsters, one after another. Each waiting for their turn. Depraved, starved. Salivating.
"Are you going to take the case?" asked me the woman.
I hesitated. "You would have me go against DeSimone?"
She took another puff off her cigarette and nodded. "That's why I came to you. It's a job no mere mortal would dare to try. So, do you take it?"
For a moment I did not speak. Instead, I looked at her, looked at her proper. Into her eyes, the two hidden temples lost in the jungle of lashes.
These days, I no longer needed textual prompts. I had eyes to see, ears to hear, nose to smell. The entire world around me was a prompt, attacking my senses on an unfathomable scale every waking moment. It was difficult, sorting through those complicated manifolds of data, but I was trying my best.
After all, what else can a person do to get by?
I thought about the case, but the puzzle had a piece missing. Something important. A key to the Kingdom. Somehow, I couldn't quite figure out what it was.
"Your accent," I said. "Are you Ukrainian?"
She shook her head. "No. I'm Russian. Or, at least, that's where grew up up. I'm an American now."
"Will you tell me your name?"
"No."
I didn't push the matter any further. It was wise to be wary with one's identity. Especially around the likes of me.
"So, are you taking the case?"
And I knew should have said no. To tell her to go away, to lose my number, to forget her friend, because she was dead. Dead as the brown begonias on the windowsills of my neighbor. If DeSimone had her, there was no getting her back...
The Blue Fairy who had given me my heart, told me to be careful with it. That it was my and my alone, and I shouldn't go giving it away to those who would see me as a tool. Because I wasn't a tool anymore.
But wasn't this something a real person would do? Should do. To not just follow the safest, optimal path, generated by some algorithmic decision tree, but to struggle, to rage, to go against the odds, even if they seemed insurmountable, if it was for a cause that felt important and right.
And there was something about this dame sitting across the desk...
"Yes," I said. "I am taking the case."