Part Four
These days the streets were devoid of cars.
Vagrants owned the roads with their bottles of booze, half lidded with the wonderment of some personal nostalgia. Gas stations were spent husks of commerce, some burnt out, not even broken plate glass remaining in ransacked mini-marts. Their signs still proudly displayed unreachable gas prices.
Thank God for electric vehicles.
Cattrell avoided making eye contact with the downtrodden as he sped down Market Street. The world was filled with city-states, not nations. Commerce existed, with multitudes of currencies changing hand, along with loyalties. The remnants of the pre-collapse world still remained, partly because the collapse did not come packaged with an apocalypse. Even when the last nations fell due to economic loss, leaders were still too fearful of nuclear war.
So everything still existed, but was broken in some way. Cars still drove, but gas was difficult. Utilities worked, with rolling blackouts. Food was still farmed, but was seasonal with frequent shortages. And movies, why those were still beloved. But only icons and legends ruled the silver screen.
What advertising still existed was for low-production copy-cat Tony Award musicals and local black and white pulp films. The “Can’t Buy Me” film series was in full force. Can’t buy me friends, can’t buy me hope. Can’t buy me love. The last active billboard in town was for a new flick. Rich girl Watsona and her new life on the streets, following a conk on the head and a bout of amnesia. Can’t buy me a life.
Cattrell took a deep breath. This one was going to be tough. A missing persons case for a non-person. No previous interests. No beliefs, no personal habits. No writings, papers, or past. Not a person but a shadow of a person, less real and infinitely more shallow than Watsona in all her celluloid glory.
He didn’t fully buy into the story of the self-aware droid. His previous experiences with family members of lost loved ones reminded him that family members always esteemed the loved ones higher than their true worth. Many times, he’d find the missing person in a brothel working as a prostitute, or slammed down on tar at a drug den in a Tenderloin slum. These people were missing only to those who loved them.
He’d found his second wife that way. It was the first missing persons sex trafficking case he ever solved. Many of the cases that followed were similar. As word got around, he became known as the wife recovery expert. Only this time, it wasn’t a man’s wife he was recovering, it was a man’s possession. One man’s junk was another man’s treasure, or so the saying goes.
Yet, the one who finds the treasure can always set it free.
Read from the beginning:
Part One | Part Two | Part Three
Read the next chapter:
Part Five
"The Girl and the Pendulum" is an 18-part future-noir science fiction story about a a private investigator's search for a missing android. How can a man who searches for missing women find lost artificial intelligence? I welcome feedback on this story about a man and his difficult case in a post-war, post collapse world. Stay tuned, as I also will begin publishing my 300,000 word epic novel "The Messiah" on Steemit in 2017.
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