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a hard bastard even by Turn standards: in Red he is a king. Doped-up gangs in surrounding areas while away the hours tearing up and down streets in armoured cars, blasting the shit out of each other with anti-tank weapons and flamethrowing the pedestrians. When they get to Ji's domain, they put the guns down and observe the speed limit until they're safely out the other side. Through a series of carefully planned and hideously successful atrocities Ji has firmly established himself as someone you under no circumstances even think about fucking with. This makes him kind of a good contact to have in Red, especially as he owes me a few favours. I owe him a few too, but the kind of favours we owe each other aren't complementary, and so they don't cancel each other out. At least we don't think they do: we've never really got to the bottom of the whole thing.
    I sat down at a table near the side and ordered some alcohol. This didn't go down well with the barman, but I coped with his disapproval. I knew that Ji's assistants monitored everyone who came into the bar through closed circuit vidiscreens, and that Ji would send word down as soon as he could be bothered. I took a sip of my drink, set my face for 'Reasonably Dangerous', and soaked up the local colour.
    The local colour was predominantly orange. The decor was orange, the drinks were orange, the lights were orange, and the bodies of the women performing languorous gynaecological examinations of each other on the orange-lit stage were painted orange too. Ji's Bar is a Dopaz bar, and as any Dopaz-drone will tell you, orange is like, the colour, of, like, orange is, you know, orange, orange is, like, orange.
    Dopaz is two things in Red Neighbourhood. It is the primary recreational drug. It is also the most common cause of death. Is Dopaz strong? Let me put it this way. Drugs are often diluted or 'cut' with other substances, either to swindle buyers or just to lower the dosage. A lot of drugs are cut with baking powder. When they cut Dopaz, they cut it with Crack.
    Most of the drones in BarJi were out there in the main bar, watching the biology lesson and drinking very low dosage Dopaz drinks, about four of which will leave you unconscious for forty-eight hours. The heavy hitters would have made their way to the rooms at the back, and tomorrow would find half of them in the piles of garbage in the street, their corpses waiting to fossilise like everything else. There's no safety net in Red Neighbourhood: if you fall, you fall. You can't leave Red for a better Neighbourhood: they've all got standards, criteria, exams or fees. If you were born Red, or end up in Red, you're not going to make it out into the light. The only way out of Red is down.
    While I waited for Ji I worked my way through Alkland's cube. The Actioneer was sixty-two years old, born and bred in the Centre. His father had been B at the Department of Hauling Ass for seven years, and then A for a record further thirteen. His mother had revolutionised the theory and practice of internal memoranda. Alkland's career leapt off the CV like an arrow or some other very straight thing: he wasn't just a man who was very good at doing things, but the perfect product of the Centre, a hundred per cent can-do person. His work during the last five years was classified, and I didn't have a high enough rating to break the code, but I knew that it must be very diligent stuff. The Department of Really Getting to the Heart of Things is the core department in the Centre. Everybody reports to them in the end, and the A there is effectively Chief Actioneer.
    The cube told you everything you needed to know about Alkland unless you weren't an Actioneer. To them, what you did in office time was what you were. But I needed to know why whoever had kidnapped him had chosen him, and not someone else. I didn't want to know what Alkland was: I needed to know who he was. I had to understand the man.
    Eventually, frustrated, I switched the setting to