Ghosts of Punktown by Jeffrey Thomas

Mendeni. Would you like to accompany me? While we eat I can register you for a bidder’s paddle, if you haven’t done so on the net already.” She tapped her wrist comp to show him how this could be accomplished.
     
         Mendeni’s wide mouth spread a little wider in an apologetic smile. “Look, I’m sorry I’m so excitable.”
     
         “We’ll call it passionate.”
     
         “I didn’t get your name, I’m afraid.”
     
         She told him, and he shook her hand. “Nice to know you, Cynthia.”
     
         She was about to ask him to call her Cynth instead, when something occurred to her. Cynthia, Simon had called her in today’s message.
     
         “You abandoned me, Cynthia. I am empty without you.”
     
         But Simon only ever called her Synthia.
     
    *     *     *
     
         Walking from Tower 3's parking lot to the building’s front entrance the next morning, Cynth again noted the verdigris tint of Tower 1, that made it look covered in lichen. Like the building that housed Jango Auctioneers and Appraisals, Tower 2 retained its polished brass exterior, only somewhat tarnished by the years. She stopped for a few moments to look between Towers 1 and 3, and recalled again the night the emergency vehicles had descended on the building she now worked in. She turned her face up toward the rows of windows in the building she had once lived in, at this angle black and staring down at her like myriad empty skull sockets. She felt the impulse to cut across the triangular park between the three buildings and enter Tower 3's front lobby, where she had often sat to read magazines...
     
         The beeping of her wrist comp jostled her out of her reverie, and she lifted her arm to study it. The call was from her supervisor, Mr. Rosetta.
     
         He was the first to inform her that item twenty-eight had been stolen from the exhibition room.
     
    *     *     *
     
         There were two of those security guards now, identical in their rubbery black attire and surly scowls, plus city law enforcers in uniform and street clothes. Cynth hung back a bit until Mr. Rosetta was free for her to approach him.
     
         “Nothing else was taken,” he told her.
     
         “Thank Raloom,” Cynth said, more to herself. “There was no guard on duty at the time?”
     
         “Only during the hours the room is open to the public, between ten and five. After that, it’s locked.”
     
         “What about cameras?”
     
         “They were down! We don’t have anything after five-thirty.”
     
         “Oh my. So someone disabled them?”
     
         “So it would seem, but they appear to be operating correctly again now.”
     
         Cynth excused herself at the earliest opportunity and hurried to her office, where she went into her files for the personal contact numbers for Mendeni and Chard Colores. As she waited for Mendeni to answer, her eyes lifted to the blank white panels of the ceiling, identical to those that covered the ceiling in the expanded exhibition area. She wondered if the brass insect arms she remembered, folded into their grooves in every ceiling of the three buildings of the Triplex, had been removed or simply covered over under new dropped ceilings. She was certain that those nimble limbs were not administering to the needs of the low income families, mutants and junkies who appeared to be the inhabitants of Tower 3 now.
     
         At last, Mendeni materialized on one of her floating screens. “Cynthia, hello! I was meaning to call you today and tell you how much I enjoyed our lunch yesterday. Any chance –”
     
         Cynth cut him off. “The statue of Lupool was stolen last night, Mendeni.”
     
         “What?” he screeched. “Stolen by who?”
     
         “You tell me.”
     
         “What do you mean, you tell me? Are you accusing me of this?”
     
         “Sorry; I only meant, your