The Go-Between

By Costa Koutsoutis

In a near-future of dirty weather, orbital-elevator space travel, and post-smart city hyper gentrification, Anastasios "Stacy" Sigg is hired to follow a woman from an office building to the airport to see who she meets. Simple, right? But the building shouldn't even exist, and non-Euclidian travel, a mysterious government group, and the nature of cities in the world all clash to make this a complicated and messy case that may not only cost Stacy his cool, but also his sanity and place in the threads that are this dimension.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Costa Koutsoutis
• Release date: Sep 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005766528

Costa Koutsoutis

Costa Koutsoutis is a writer who lives and works in his hometown of New York City. His fiction & nonfiction has appeared in print and online in places like Akashic Books’ “Monday Are Murder” short crime fiction series, the book Team Cul De Sac: Cartoonists Draw the Line at Parkinson’s from Andrews McNeel, the horror fiction podcast The Alexandria Archives, the long-running punk subculture magazine Razorcake, and more. Some of his work include the sci-fi near-future novella The Go-Between, the essay collection Lightning Crashes Here, and the detective fiction of Running The Train and All The Stories, featuring the adventures of PI/bondsman Ben Miles. Besides burying his head in the keyboard writing things, he can be found chasing the cat around, watching cooking shows and horror movies, and generally plotting how to get his hands on a full suit of steel-plate armor. You know, for fun.

Book preview

01.

The thing about airports is that they never really feel like a part of the world.

And that’s the thing, right? They’re not a part of our world, they’re liminal, transitory spaces that exist to move us from one place to another. Even if an airport stands in one place for a thousand years, never moving, it will be a liminal space, a form of transportation unto itself in a way that a bus station or train station never will be. They’re part of the world, you can look around and through windows at the parking lots and streets outside and below. A train or bus station, standing there about to go out the doors, you’re still within the space of the world in which we exist.

Besides the obviousness of their isolation, far from the meandering crowds of everyday life and civilization, the few windows only really giving you a view of the transportation that is meant to continue moving you elsewhere, everywhere else in an airport is like the urban legend architecture of a Las Vegas casino. There’s everything you could need for all your food and drink and shopping needs, the new ones have the pods and the mini-motels and the massage chairs and benches. People willingly-camp out in airports, allowing themselves to enter the stasis of a liminal space, as weirdly-contradictory as that might sound.

The neon lights above me were blinking in an old World War 2 Morse code pattern, an art installation of intertwined multi-colored arteries like unspooled yarn, interwoven into a metal tubing skeleton that, according to the LCD panel on the wall, was an appropriation of a dinosaur.

Go figure.

I strode from the one vein of connection to outside into the airport itself, the subway terminal that let one lonely train come from the city into  this space, breathing that crisp air that I could hear moving, the strength of the filtered circulation creating a slight pressure in your ears if you moved too slow, reminding you to keep walking, destination to destination to destination across the fake marble flooring, cut with more faux-red tile asymmetrical tile patterns to create a look that had been popular maybe sixty years ago. The metal ridges though, the way you could tell this floor had been manufactured in slabs and assembled like a sheet cake, they were new and shiny, showing the divides between the slabs, the real way you were unable to hide the age here of the airport.

Technically, it was more than just an airport, I thought, staring out one of those rare windows, seeing across the tarmac at the near-distance structure of tubing that wasn’t too far off from the art installation that in the corner of my eye, was still blinking. The base of the orbital elevator was there, still surrounded in most of the construction scaffolding that, based on what I’d heard, was going to be made a permanent part of the whole thing. Ugly and right-angled all over, iron tubing and slabs of corrugated plastic that, the construction crews had discovered, according to what that Internet video I’d seen told, accidentally held the whole thing up. I kept walking past the window, and the outside disappeared again, replaced by better-than-outside shiny LCD screens flashing about...something, I wasn’t paying attention.

I had my eye on the woman two people ahead of me.

Every Thursday for the last two months, she’d left an office that didn’t exist in a building in the city, and took the subway through a myriad of changing stations and back-pedaling before ending up on this one, came to the airport, and wandered around for a while, sorta doing nothing. Which, to be honest, wasn’t that strange because I’d done similar stuff before, going to places that are large, that are public, that exist to be moved through.

Parks, sure, but also drug stores, bus stations, large chain outlet places, parking lots in industrial parks. Temples to commerce and capitalism and