Strangers Among Us

Carnivores-1

CARNIVORES

Rich Larson

Finch pried himself out of the autocab midway down Jasper Avenue, where Carnivor gastro-bistro, the city’s most exclusive new eatery, skulked between concrete high-rises. He’d read up on the restaurant’s architecture when he and Blake first started planning the heist, so he knew it was a collaboration between a Bolivian artist and a decaying engineering AI, and that the swooping ridges of the façade, together with its calcium-spike stalactites, were meant to evoke the maw of an animal. For everyone with neural implants synched up to fine dining augreality, the restaurant’s name was slashed into the air in bright red.

Finch thought it was a bit kitschy. Blake, his partner in crime, thought it was bleeding edge haute couture and required Finch order a new suit that was not bleeding ugly. The Armani jacket already felt unpleasantly tight around his bookcase shoulders and thick-ribbed chest—a problem Finch was well used to. Not many stores catered to Neanderthal hybrid proportions.

The autocab squawked for payment. Finch licked his massive thumb and stuck it against the reader, then held the taxi in place by its door frame while he checked his appearance in the window. He ran a hand over his slicked red hair and adjusted the Full Windsor noose around his neck, wondering if the tattoos clawing out from under his cuffs looked professional enough in cobalt blue or if he should have masked them completely.

Finch let the autocab skitter back into traffic. It didn’t matter how he looked. The darknet CV Blake had done up for him was a bullshit masterpiece, and Carnivor’s proprietor, if her hacked pornstream was any indication, had a Neanderthal fantasy not uncommon among professional women. Finch inhaled. The cold air smelled like exhaust and something almost as pungent that his nose, tuned to Blake-imposed veganism, took a moment to recognize as cooking meat.

He made his way through the dilating doors into a mirrored entryway, where he was stopped by a bouncer who seemed to be mostly composed of HGH-pumped muscle and hair gel.

“Slow up, Red.” He tapped the neural plug set into the shaved side of his head, making his starched Mohawk wobble slightly. “I don’t see you on the f*******:. In this modern day and age, you need to make a reservation, you know? And at Carnivor, we backlog up to three months.”

“I’m not a guest,” Finch said, sizing him up on old instinct. Scarred knuckles, crooked nose, probably fancied himself a boxer. The nametag scrolling down his breast pocket read Vick. “I’m here to see Ms. Carrow.” He tapped his own plug, down behind his ear, and shuttled over the Carnivor-red interview request.

A briefly hurt look flashed across Vick’s face before he regained his pre-set smirk. “Have to frisk you down, then,” he said, cracking his fingers. “You’re awful pale. Must be Irish, right?”

Finch stood scarecrow as the bouncer frisked. “Not that I know of. You?”

“You in the gravity gym a lot? What do you squat on standard?” Vick slapped one of Finch’s tree-trunk quads. “Big old haunches on you. Big veins, too, I got tiny veins, shitty circulation—”

Finch snagged the man’s hand tight enough to feel tendons rasp up on each other, then slowly moved it away.

Vick turned his grimace into a grin as he yanked his fingers back. “Your kind aren’t much for conversation, are they? More used to grunting.”

“You done?”

“Yeah, I’m done. Left your club at home, obviously.” Vick nodded toward the interior. “Right this way.”

Finch ran through a few ways to snap Vick’s neck as he followed him across a gleaming obsidian floor, past copses of smartglass tables and spiny organic sculptures. He watched a gaggle of Ghanaian businessmen wearing fashionably gashed suits put in their order while what appeared to be 2010s slaughterhouse footage played across their table. Finch shook his head. Kitschy as f**k.

While Vick was distracted by the swaying hips of a neon-lipped server, Finch scanned for fire exits, motion sensors, and small black cameras nestled in the ceiling corners. What he took to be the private dining alcoves were hidden behind a noise-cancelling black shroud.

Caught up in sending Blake the footage, Finch brushed against one of the shuddering sculptures and received a blast of hot peppery breath full in the face. He swore loud enough for Vick to turn around and give a hyena giggle. His eyes stung all the way though the silver-white labyrinth of Carnivor’s kitchens, where cooks doing prep-work shouted to each other in a thick blend of Tagalog, Somali and English. The smell of meat hung heavy, almost dripping.

Finch was still blinking away tears when they arrived at the door to Ms. Carrow’s office. Vick pointed him in without speaking, suddenly sour-faced, then stalked away.

“Thanks, Vick,” Finch called after him, flipping the bird to his turned back.

Ms. Holly Carrow was in virtual conference when Finch stepped inside and closed the synthetic oak door behind him. Her dim-lit office was partially overgrown, with a faux-skylight shafting artificial sunshine onto the artful twists of branch and vine sprouting through the glass floor. Very envirochic, very expensive. It matched up with the utterly obscene amounts of anonymized money Blake had found flowing into Carnivor’s accounts, which in turn seemed linked to a mysterious bi-monthly delivery from a Brazilian medi/pharma company.

Very envirochic, very expensive, very warm. Finch did not do well with warm. Wasn’t built for it. He could already feel sweat prickling along his hairline as he approached Carrow’s desk. She was reclined in an orthochair, her dark head tipped back in its cradle. Neural plugs pulsed at her chemically smoothed temples. Her lips looked like a line of dried blood and her jawline was wide and perfectly angled.

Finch touched his own with some measure of jealousy, rasping his thumb along the coarse beard that helped obscure his Neanderthal lack of chin. As he stepped through the dappled light, a spindly-looking chair unfolded itself opposite the desk and blinked an inviting green. Finch sat gingerly; he’d done in their apartment’s cheap folding chair that morning halfway through Blake styling his hair.

Finch put his hands on his knees to wait, and realized the roll of his trousers looked like a miniature chub. Right as he was smoothing out his crotch, the restaurateur’s eyes flicked open. People always came out of a deep slice at the most inopportune moments. Finch tried to move his hand in a natural path to his knee.

“Sorry for the wait.” Carrow’s sea-green eyes tracked the movement like a laser. She gave a faint smile. “I hope it wasn’t making you . . . squirmy.”

“Not at all.”

“Good.” Carrow’s chair reconfigured, sliding her upright, and she extended a hand to make it all one sinuous motion. “Mr. Finch, I presume.”

Finch took it, finding it drier than he’d expected and strong. “Pleasure.”

“You have a very impressive CV, Mr. Finch.” She looked at the girth of his knuckles with more than faint interest—Finch remembered a few favourites from her pornstream and tried not to let it show on his face. “Private security coordinator for EpiGen. Paramilitary service in Pakistan and India. Very impressive.”

Finch blinked. “I do what I’m good at, I suppose.”

“Yes.” Carrow’s eyes roved down his chest, lingered a millisecond too long at his hips. Her cheeks tinted with a near-imperceptible flush Finch knew to look for. “We all play the cards we’re dealt. Genetically or otherwise. But I do wonder why a former CEO bodyguard wants to work security at Carnivor.”

Finch squeezed his kneecap. Blake had made the CV too perfect. He had that tendency. “I’m at the point where I need a position that’s longer term and lower risk.” Finch paused, then played the trump card. “We don’t live so long as you. Thirty-three is middle aged, for a neo. Cell decay will set in soon.”

The restaurateur leaned forward. “You’re a survivor from the original batch, then? From the Bangkok biolabs?”

Finch didn’t have to lie on this point. “Yes. Number 23.”

“I knew it,” Carrow breathed. “Well, ah, suspected. I’ve always wanted to meet . . .” She trailed off, trying to re-establish herself. “What they did in those labs was an atrocity. The experimentation. You should know I was a fervent supporter of the Diaspora Act. Referendum 88, as well. Neo rights are a bit of a passion of mine.”

“I don’t follow the politics.” Another thing he didn’t have to lie about.

“You don’t feel a certain responsibility to—”

“I’m me, first,” Finch cut her off. “Anything else, second. Including neo.”

Carrow’s dark red frown reshaped to a sheepish smile. “I’m sorry. I must sound like a paleochaser who’s side-windowing the wiki.”

“Not at all,” Finch said, sliding the polite veneer back over his voice. “I can tell when someone’s reading the wiki. You know, ‘you must have been so happy on August 16, 2055 when clone-grown Neanderthal-human hybrids gained full citizen rights.’ s**t like that.”

“Terrible.” The restaurateur rose; her orthochair reluctantly put its massage pads away. “I’ve been in virtual all day, Mr. Finch. Walk with me.” Finch creaked off his own chair and shadowed her over to the twisted trees. She wrapped her fingers around a moss-slick branch. “These aren’t real,” she admitted, sliding her hand up and down the length. “Real would have been too cheap.”

Finch shrugged, ignoring the phallic tableau. “They’re nice.”

“Sometimes people have trouble with real and not real,” Carrow said delicately, releasing the branch. “Sometimes mere illusion is offensive enough to make people take real action. An all-meat eatery, whether it’s vat grown or not, attracts its share of critics. That’s part of the charm, of course. Being contentious. The restaurant business is all about novelty.”

“I tend to eat vegan, myself.”

“So do I.” Carrow smiled as she wiped her hands together, then turned serious. “For the past month, Carnivor has been receiving anonymous vitriol from an individual, or perhaps a small group, who take issue with our mode and aesthetic. They think it trivializes the horrors of the defunct livestock industry. Or something. I wasn’t much concerned with them until they started making threats against our clientele’s safety.”

Finch remembered the late nights with Blake, composing anti-meat rants and credible bomb threats over a bottle of Luna vodka and hash. They’d gotten quite good at it.

“We attract an influential clientele,” Carrow said, leaning back against the tree, managing to exaggerate the camber of her back with relative grace. “Movie stars, moguls, athletes. Bookings for our more exclusive offerings are often made months in advance.” She paused. “We take the privacy of our guests very seriously. While most come here to be seen, others come here for the opposite. That’s why I’m looking to improve Carnivor’s security. I’d like to ensure no dining experience is interrupted by anti-meat radicals or celebrity chasers. The only man we have now, Vicky, is a bit . . . unreliable.”

“I feel qualified to do that, Ms. Carrow,” Finch said, lowering his voice to a controlled rumble as he stepped closer. “Though I would, of course, like to negotiate upward on the salary.”

Carrow smiled again, the flush coming back stronger. “Well, we haven’t discussed a benefits package yet, have we?”

Finch couldn’t resist unzipping his trousers once he was out the door, then doing them up again, noisily, on his way past Vick, whose face turned taut and ashy in a way that almost made Finch feel bad for the prick.

“She doesn’t f**k in her office,” the bouncer snarled.

“Doesn’t f**k you, you mean. Maybe it’s the haircut.”

Vick’s response was guillotined by the arrival of a designer-swathed couple smelling like cheap pheromone spray and expensive liquor. He checked them against the f*******: with his jaw clenched tight, and gave a smile that was more grimace as a server led them off.

“Once she does f**k you, she’ll fire you,” he said. “She just wants some neo c**k. Then you’re back out on your ass. She loves her little ironies.” He preened his Mohawk in the mirror wall, deadly serious. “And don’t even think about hurting her. I’ve always wanted a go at a caveman.”

That word still sliced into Finch’s stomach, even after all these years. He felt the tips of his ears redden.