“All right, biiiiiitch! This is hackin’ as fuuuuuck!” I shout to myself as I fall back on my couch and pull out my brand new Telaphone. Fucking Roy said they were all the same, but he’s totally wrong. This one is black and the last one was just really really dark grey. What an idiot!
“Wake up, phone!” I command, giggling like a schoolgirl as the logo comes up. I’m really drunk and it’s really shiny. We make a good team. “KONNICHIWA—“ As Tela sees my face, she seems to instinctively recoil in terror. “P-please, Señor Blake-s-sama!” she whines, crocodile anime tears falling from her stupid wavering watermelon sized anime eyes. “I-I don’t know why you would want to hurt Señorita Tela-chan, after all we’ve been through…”
“It’s because you use stupid Chinese honorary tag word things and talk in the th-third person, b-biiiiiiiitch,” I reply, burping the word “bitch” because I’m so witty when I’m drunk. Just kidding, I’m always witty.
“Those terms Tela uses are Japanese, Blake-san, and they’re called honorifics! If you’d like to learn them, I can add the Japanese language pack to your NeurOS for only–”
“Yeah, well, with you they should be called honWHORErifics, because I’m tired of you whoring out paid upgrades to me! And–and I’m even more tired of being called ‘Sahn,’ you–you fuckin’ weebshit spyware!”
“Does Señor Blake-san not love Tela as she is?” Tela proceeds to bawl like a dying kid in a shitty old kaiju flick, and all my remaining drunken concentration is redirected to fighting the urge to defenestrate her again (if you haven’t paid for the vocab pack on your NeurOS yet, here’s a freebie: defenestrate means to throw someone out a window!). “Tela can change for Blake-san!” she continues, suddenly back to being all sparkly eyed and obnoxious. “Tela’s ‘Not a Weeb-Shit DLC pack is only 900 Telecreds now, and with it comes a lack of honorifics, a normally pitched voice, and a special, less obnoxious—”
“Tela, I don’t love you. You are a digital assistant on my phone. I’m not that far gone. Yet. Now–” I grab my mouse and pull up my ‘Noir Detective Playlist,’ playing a super smooth and ominous Jazz riff. I hadn’t even realized it was raining again until the fitting music came on, but it was fucking great because I felt like one of those cool noir detectives again. “Back to business: I need a mystery to solve…”
I take a swig of my backup flask for inspiration--Midori mixed with Pinnacle brand vodka, the French shit. I go to bring the flask to my manly lips again for clarity when I once again notice the totally hackin’ skull tat on the back of my hand. Alcohol saves me once again! I finish the flask to celebrate a mystery well rediscovered, stick my Telaphone in my pocket, and march out.
I hobble out of the elevator and wave to the cute Asian girl who’s manning the front check-in desk. She has one of those cute cut-short brunette haircuts and is wearing a tight leather crop-top over a ripped denim skirt--nothing left to the imagination, which is good because I’m too drunk to have one. New today are her LED fingernail Chans that are currently glowing blue to match her glowing-implant-fueled blue lipstick--can you say glowjob? Ha! Totally my type. She’s bopping her head to the silence, so she’s either using a neural music chan or is going totally fucking crazy. Or both. I wave louder, but she just averts her eyes and makes the “oh god not that drunken shithead again” face. I call the face that because that’s what she said the first time she made the face, and it stuck. But whatever, I’m still gonna be polite, because I’m the bigger man in this situation, and not just because I’m like almost six feet tall and she’s like three feet max.
I wander through the apartment complex’s automatic sliding fancy glass moving window thing at the entrance (I think there’s a better word for it) out into the street in the pouring rain and realize at about that time that I’m still in my underwear. I was shirtless at the phone store, but why did I take off my pants to open my phone box? Did I buy that thigh-high DLC after all? I quickly snap my mind back on track. I’m on a mission, dammit, and a lack of pants in the pouring rain wasn’t going to stop that. I grab my flask for focus, and…
Ahhh fuck me, it’s empty. Better go back inside for pants. And then inside of the ABC Store. I walk back through the sliding walk-through window thing and pause for a moment to let the accumulated downpour drip off me onto the big black doormat so nobody trips and falls from my rain trails and sues. Can’t have that, now. As I shake like a wet dog in the doorway in front of the sliding glass window thing, I notice that girl at the front desk is staring directly at my junk—no doubt mesmerized by the way my soaked Battle Crisis Mech Girl boxers are clinging to my impressive girth. This is a situation that calls for the language of romance.
“It’s por encima del promedio,” I say in a perfect, deep, suave accent, nodding coolly in her general direction. She laughs. Ouch. I limp back to the elevator and as I push the button to Floor 13 I look down and realize… ‘it’ shrank in the rain. Cojome! No wonder she wasn’t impressed. Oh well, this is my floor. I’m too hammered still to remember my room number right off, but I’m guessing it’s the one down the hall with the door wide open and water trickling out into the hallway. I step inside and oh, hey, the floor is drenched, but the window’s back.
“I had the nice window Drorbs come and replace your window before your office got all wet, Blake-san!” Tela chirps.
“Hey, look at you, you actually did something fucking right,” I mumble, cracking a slight smile and sitting back down in my leather spinny chair throne. “How much did it cost me?”
“Only 10,000 Telecredits!” Tela replies, shooting me the peace sign and a big grin. I pick up the phone and throw it at the new window. It bounces harmlessly off with a slight ‘boing’ sound. “Tela knew Blake-san would do that! That’s why Tela paid the extra for Flexiglass!”
I chuckle and shuffle across the room to retrieve her. “Heh, that was pretty clever. You’re gettin’ more and more like me after all.” I shamble over to the closet in the back corner, stick some black jeans on, throw on a super kickass and vintage Linguine Arf t-shirt (whatever the fuck a Linguine Arf is), and slap on my casual jacket (black leather with ten pockets—oh yeah!).
I reach for my super cool shades: the one-piece visor kind, hackin’ as hell and all the rage with the hip and with it peeps, like me–
“Blake-san!” Tela interrupts, “You don’t need sunglasses! It’s raining and cloudy! The chances of UV eye damage are less than 5%!”
“Tela,” I sigh, “I don’t do this for practicality. I do this for style. It’s a human thing, you wouldn’t understand.”
“I understand that you’re going to look like a real cunt out there, Blake-sama.”
I pause. Tela is right, and she said it so eloquently that I can’t even be angry. Just proud, like a father whose little girl just finished a whole bottle of Vodka by herself for the first time. I put the shades down and have Tela schedule me a Drivepod to the ABC store. About two minutes later, one with my name on it (literally—the 3D words ‘CHARLES BLAKE’ are spinning around the thing holographically) pulls up and opens its door to me. I know it’s convenient, and I love that it’s all a single-payer thing since gas money used to cut into my alcohol fund, but it’s still unsettling to me climbing into a self-driving monstrosity with one seat. That, and a big part of me misses driving… and having more than one person in a car… and just generally everything that isn’t “being babysat by my Big Brother phone in a goddamned soap bubble on wheels.”
“I’m Drivepod Tela #343, but my given name is Charlotte!” A little black-haired chibi anime girl in a suit pops up on the dashboard and salutes me, doing a cute wink. “Mr. Blake, you wanted to go to the ABC store, is that correct?”
“Yes. Jesus Christ, where else do I ever go, Charlotte?”
“Last time, Charlotte took Mr. Blake to the strip club! Then Charlotte had to call another pod because Mr. Blake got drunk and—”
“Ahhh, cut it out, Charlotte. The past is the past, baby, my alcoholic days of–” Wait, really?! Has it really only–uh… Monday, Tuesday… “…of last week are over! I’m a changed man, d-damn it! Now take me to the fucking ABC store; onward, onward!”
“Of course, Mr. Blake! All you had to do was ask!” Charlotte bows and then pulls up a tiny little holographic steering wheel that she plays on, vaguely mimicking the actual movements of the pod.
“Tela, play some New Wave,” I say. My Tela shows up beside Charlotte and pulls out a boombox, and soon the impressive sound system in the Drivepod is playing Dead or Alive. Looking out the glass sides of this thing while I listen to this song, watching the neon club signs blur by in the rain, being chaperoned by holographic anime girls—I guess this isn’t really so bad. It’s actually kind of hardcore. It’s also pretty hardcore that I have this unexplained bleeding-eyes skull tattoo. “Damn,” I say, “I’m hardcore.”
“Yes, you are, Blake-san!” Tela cheers. Maybe she’s not so bad.
“Thanks, Tela. Hey, let’s try this again–what does this tattoo mean?” I ask.
“Tela will look for Blake-san!” Tela replies, winking and vanishing for a second. When she reappears, she’s completely emotionless and stands statically in place, like a 3D model with no rigging or animation set. I’ve heard this is called a “tea-pose.” It’s disconcerting.
“Your Tela has attempted to access an illegal page in the Telenet,” a robotic male voice I’ve never heard before says. “If you believe you received this message in error, please contact your nearest Telaphone repair facility or dealer. Your Telaphone will now restart.” Tela vanishes again, then pops up a few seconds later like nothing had ever happened. “...Tela isn’t really sure, Blake-san~!” she croons, acting like the rest never happened. “It seems like Tela isn’t supposed to look that up! I guess it’s a mystery, Blake-san!”
“That’s okay, then. Know why? ‘Cause solving mysteries is a detective’s number one job, biiiiiiiiitch!”
“I thought a detective’s number one job was walking away from explosions,” Tela replies.
“That’s a cool guy’s job, Tela. And I’m a cool guy detective, so I have many jobs.”
“Wooow,” she replies, her oversized eyes sparkling with wonder.