Saul woke up woke up soaked in sweat. His first thought was nerves, but a pained whirring told him the AC had broken in the night. He slowly got up and shut off the pained machine, and then walked over to the door to his hotel room. A thin, square, clear-plastic case had been slid under the door, replacing the small envelope of cash he’d left the night before. Inside the case was a small silver disk, maybe 5 inches wide. Saul bent over and picked it up, examining it. The surface was scratched and marked with use, but the disk inside seemed in good condition. He carried it over to the window, and sat down at the small dining table. On the table was another piece of hardware in similar condition; a small plastic box called a “CD Player”. The player was jury-rigged to a small black box that transmitted the signal coming from the player into his auricular implants. Saul pushed a button on the player, and the power light blinked feebly. He opened the plastic case and took out the disk, and attempted to load it into the player, but it just spit it back out. After a few more fruitless attempts, he realized he had been putting it in upside down. He flipped the disk over and slid it into the player. The machine made a whirring noise as it spun up the disk, and he heard a faint crackling from his implant. A man’s voice came out of the noise, skipping and distorted slightly.
“Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
The voice faded just as the music started. At first just a few notes from a rhythm guitar with a brush-drumbeat. Then, church organ chords and harpsichord chirps. A whining violin and a thrubbing drum, and a dozen more he couldn’t recognise. All discordant at first, but soon Saul felt the instruments begin to harmonize, to coalesce. At the same time, his vision started to blur, and he felt, more than saw, the walls and furniture of his hotel room fade and evaporate. He lost feeling in his skin, and found himself floating in a pure white emptiness.
—-
Night was beginning to fall in the city, and Lieutenant Jackson was struggling to get through the open air market in Chinatown. He hated large crowds, but even with the dense crowd it was still the shortest route. The loud and urgent Chinese all around him heightened his disquiet. Vendors, patrons, or just pedestrians; a million discordant voices. Every few minutes, he’d recognise a word from his school days, but this only served to distract him, and heighten his anxiety. Eventually, he made it though the viscous crowd and into the empty and poorly-lit streets of The Strait,
Outside the hotel, there were a few cop cars and a van, and the yellow caution tape blocking the sidewalk. The flashes of the siren lights revealed stains and graffiti on the old bricks, washed in blue and red. Inside, Jackson passed the forensics team on the stairs, hauling their “luggage”: Several steel boxes of apparently very heavy equiptment.