pompadour fields
The sky was the soot-black pane of an old apartment window. Where the smoke thinned, the sun made lace of it, light stippled and complex.
Murphy walked at an angle, his coat trailing behind him. One hand on his hat, he fought along the street against a howler up Avenue Chiara. Low somewhere on the horizon, through the fog down across the bay, the lights atop Tinker’s Dam were a chain around a delicate, broken neck.
Murphy never came down here but for work. Most streets in Pompadour Fields didn’t have net access because of the microwave towers — so you had to question people in person. In addition to that, the people he wanted weren’t the kind pre-disposed to talking to cops. Anyone who knew this girl Keisha well enough to give him a lead was either a streetwalker like her, a customer, or someone he’d likely arrested years ago as a beat cop.
That Keisha was a hooker should have meant something to Murphy, so he decided it didn’t. He thought of all the things in her life that would have brought her to that end of the trade, and all the events that would land his regular girl at the legal end. When gene registration became mandatory for sex work, the prices were set high — plainly to keep out undesirables. That this would just drive a portion of the population underground and retain a vestigial illegality to hooking was something the lawyers and pols didn’t think much about.
Murphy checked his phone — still unable to get a feed. He swore. He regretted not grabbing a car this morning. He could have gotten online in the car.
Pompadour Fields was the last idea the city of Rebekka had before she gave up on people. He remembers as a kid. Countless flamewars on local threads, arguments he didn’t quite get. Links he never followed to names like Jacobs, Moses… People eventually forgot, of course. The Pomp got lost soon enough under three or four soft reboots of the media cycle. Though the bureaucracy never forgot, by the time the last thumbprint was recorded, the spirit had shifted. When the Pomp opened and the freelance citizens were bussed in, population trading was furious. The Pomp held on for a while, white-knuckled at the doorjamb. But you could hear the vacuum sucking at your heels down there, and it wasn’t long before the freelancers went. Moved over the bay and took their taxes with them, screaming into the night. Since then, the Pomp lay down and went to sleep, populated now only by nightmares that find their way by the lightning arc of the free energy towers.