For as annoying as Moss found it, there was truth to what he had said. Moss had almost no perks in his hex, he had an unadorned drudge, and still had very little saved. He was fine at his job, but not great and didn’t aspire to be. He was content in his life, but that was it.
He snorted as he brought up the menu of available work orders. As he always did, he picked the next nearest job rather than the highest priority (and therefore highest value) job. Moss grimaced, Ira’s words still ringing as he rode off. Moss felt a pang he couldn’t quite identify.
“He’s right,” Moss said.
“You believe Osiris is correct?” Two inquired.
“Yes, bring up the full list of all work orders, regardless of availability,” Moss said with a grin. Two did so and Moss looked at the display. Moss had watched Ira head northeast toward the road. He saw that the top priority job was in the same direction and had an engineer assigned. They were seven minutes away. If Ira stuck to the road, Moss thought he would arrive in five. He brought the job to the forefront.
“Chart the quickest path to this job, the direct route,” Moss ordered.
“This job may be of higher difficulty than—” Two began but Moss cut him off, firing up his bike’s engine.
“Just chart it!” he demanded.
“Of course,” Two agreed, displaying a line directly to the work. The bike rocketed through the field of panels, the thrusters kicking up earth and rocks as he sped to the job.
“Any damage to your bike—” Two began, but Moss was too excited to let him finish.
“I know it. I’ll make up for it in job completion,” Moss announced. He kept an eye on the time as he weaved through the fields. The company docked pay for time spent without designating a work order, but Moss did not want to give Ira a heads up to his plan. He felt a thud and the bike bounced over a large rock which he did not react quickly enough to avoid, but he was making good time.
Soon the dot of the job appeared in his HUD. He was close. He saw the panel sparking in the distance and it drove him forward. He would stop for nothing. He saw neither Ira’s drudge nor the assigned engineer. A devilish smile crossed his lips as he selected DESIGNATE JOB and turned his bike to come to a stop with a flourish at the base of the panel. ACCEPT WORK ORDER. His heart raced. The job was his.
Osiris pulled up a moment later. “Well played, kid,” he conceded and Moss knew that somewhere the man was kicking himself.
“All’s fair.” Moss heard the bravado in Two’s transmitted words. Osiris gave a conciliatory nod before fishtailing his bike in a plume of dust and speeding away to steal someone else’s work. Moss beamed a moment before realizing he now actually had to complete the repair. “All right, Two. Let’s do this.”
“Yes, sir,” the drudge replied, and they got to work.
As he finished the complex job, he heard a pounding and shook his head, Two’s robotic head moving back and forth in near unison.
“You hear that?” Moss asked.
“Negative,” Two replied and Moss brought up a system check which ran instantly. SYSTEM NORMAL, the screen displayed. He heard the pounding again. “Could the sound be coming from your hex? There have been four reports of malfunctioning pipes on your floor in the past two weeks, according to records,” Two helped.
“Could be. Go into Standby for a moment?” he asked and heard Two whir down.
He flipped the switch in his hand and blinked hard at being in the real world so quickly. His implant felt awkward. As his eyes adjusted, he heard the pounding one more time and realized it was coming from the door to his hex. Doorbell, and the screen displayed the empty hallway in front of his door. He furrowed his brows, confused and bothered. He didn’t understand how someone could be knocking on his door, as that was what he had decided it sounded like, but not be in the hall.
Moss heard the pounding through the heavy plastic door and muffled words. Nervous, he walked over and pressed OPEN. The door hissed up and before him stood an angry looking woman dressed in the most peculiar way Moss had ever seen.
“Take longer,” she growled, and Moss just stared. She wore a white fishnet bodysuit which showed from within her tall, black leather boots up to her neck. From a studded black leather belt hung a tartan skirt cut with slits and an ancient military style baltea—studded leather straps which served as groin protection. The ensemble was completed with a tattered leather jacket with small metal spikes running along the shoulders and down the arms with patches covering nearly every inch. Her neon pink microdyed hair shimmered with silver like a cascading waterfall. Black eyeliner smudged with sweat encircled impatiently expectant eyes.
“You gonna let me in?” She gestured for Moss to move inside before looking back and forth down the hall. “We don’t have all day to stand here, are you ready to go?”
“You have the wrong person,” Moss squeaked, positioning his body to keep her at the door. She was instantly the sexiest and most terrifying thing he had ever come in contact with. He questioned if he was in the midst of a lucid dream. This person could not be real. She wasn’t actually standing before him. She rolled her eyes and shoved him into the hex and pressed the CLOSE button on the door frame.
“I don’t have the wrong person,” she said in a tone which made Moss feel as though he was stupid.
“Who—Who are you?” he forced from his mouth.
“You’re Moss right?” she answered his question with a question.
“Yes,” he said, utterly nonplussed.
“So, what’s the fucking hold up?” she snarled. Moss looked around the room as though there would be cameras set up. He had seen shows on the Burb Network where the hosts would play pranks on unsuspecting employees. The woman seemed to watch his eyes.
“Are we being watched?” she accused more than asked.
“What? No. I don’t know,” he answered.
“What’s your problem? You don’t seem ready to go at all, I don’t see a bag and you’re wearing.” She grabbed his sleeve. “What are these, pajamas?” Moss’s heart was racing, and he could feel sweat coating his body. He had never been so confounded in his life and this angry person was talking to him like he was someone else. He found some courage buried within him.
“Look, I don’t know who you are, what you think you’re doing here, or who you think I am, but I am not the person you are looking for,” he stated, trying to square his shoulders and look tough but even he knew he looked weak. It was the woman’s turn to look confused.
“Chicken Thumbs never found you?” she asked and Moss didn’t understand the question or know how to respond to it.
“What does that even mean?” he asked and the woman dropped her head, her shoulder length hair shimmering in front of her face.
“Shit,” she uttered and looked back up at him sorrowfully. “Sit down.”
Chapter 2
“Who are you?” Moss demanded.
“Ynna,” she answered, turning her eyes on him. In them, he saw several lifetimes of age though she appeared to be only a few years his senior, if that. “Please, sit down,” she said in a softer tone which made him all the more uneasy. He complied and sat in the single chair by the Foodier. “CT was going to fill you in on all this, but maybe he got caught.” The word “caught” made Moss even more nervous and he unconsciously began bouncing his knee.
“What are you talking about?” He heard the resignation in his own voice as if he had accepted the defeat of pure confusion.
“Listen, Moss, you are part of something. Your parents—” Ynna began but was cut short.
“Alert!” a computerized voice crackled through the speaker in the room and Ynna’s eyes went wide with terror. “You have been away from work for five minutes, employee. If you are experiencing medical distress, please enter your Dermidos and allow for a scan. ThutoCo values you and your health.”
“The fuck?” Ynna asked.
“It’s my shift. I can’t just log out during work,” he explained.
“Yikes,�
�� she mocked but Moss didn’t understand. “Can you deal with that? We need a little time.”
“Yeah, uh, okay,” Moss mumbled as he stood. He walked over to his workspace and began entering the manual commands on the screen.
APPLICATION FOR EARLY BREAK.
A drop-down menu appeared, requiring a reason for the request.
PERSONAL TIME.
It was instantly approved. Moss had not used any personal time in years and had more than enough accrued to take the rest of the week off. Content to work during the day and watch the screen at night, he had never used a vacation day either. He often told people he wanted to get out and see the world, and he did. Theoretically. Something within him did want to experience what the wider world had to offer but he had become too content, too complacent to act on it.
He had used one sick day. It still haunted him—the one taint on an otherwise perfect record. But he was too sick to move from his bed and DocBot gave him such a heavy cocktail of drugs that Moss slept through nearly the whole day. He was fine by the following morning when he found out that most employees had spent the previous day the same way he had. The rumor was that some of the bacteria which made the land outside the cities poisonous to humans had gotten into the food, but Moss thought it doubtful. He believed ThutoCo when they explained to the employees that the bacteria from the Prophet Root (which had saved and cursed humanity) had never made its way into the food distribution subsystems.
“Okay,” he told Ynna. “We have time.” He didn’t know why he was accommodating all this. He could easily call security silently and have this woman taken away. He couldn’t understand why he didn’t do it. It would be so easy. Be done with this entire moment so quickly. Make it a memory of that one time some weirdo showed up at his hex. He knew that with every passing moment, he could be getting himself into trouble. But he didn’t send her away. He sat down and waited for her to speak. She did.
“Okay, Moss, here goes,” she began, seeming to struggle to find the right way to explain things. “CT would have been able to explain this better. I was not supposed to, but whatever. You are one small cog here in a massive, evil industrial machine. But there are people outside who are working to expose ThutoCo to the world. We are trying to get information out, but we need help from within and that’s why I am here. To help you help us.”
Her crystal blue eyes stared into his, reading his reaction. He didn’t understand what she meant. Employees complained about their jobs and the Iras of the world, but he had never heard the word evil ascribed to the company.
“We feed the world,” he protested.
She rolled her eyes. “Sure.”
“And off world too!” he added, pointing a finger toward the ceiling to help his point.
“While that may be true, you also kill the world,” she pointed out, clearly trying to suppress anger. Her eyes narrowed and her fingers dug into her knee.
“Some death is the price of all life,” he parroted another company line. Ynna groaned, seeming to hate that she was even engaging in this conversation.
“Do you know how people live outside of this building? Have you ever even left it?” she pressed.
“No,” Moss admitted, feeling ashamed of himself though he didn’t understand why.
“Well, it’s bad out there. You’ll see tonight,” she explained.
“What’s tonight?” he asked nervously, not sure he wanted the answer. He was beginning to feel as though he was careening toward the edge of a cliff and while his knee bounced more than it ever had in his life, a curious spark of excitement was igniting a flame.
“Tonight, you take this to me at a bar in the city” and she extended a robotic hand out to him, the metal fingers unfurling like the legs of spiders to reveal a data chip. He stared at her hand, the crude exposed wires, gears and rusted bolts. He had never seen anything like it. Any prosthetics he had seen were near-perfect recreations of the human form. The Relief Aides were nothing more than metal, silicone, and plastic wrapped in a polydimethylsiloxane skin, yet to touch and see them, they were as real to him as people. Her hand was more drudge than a person.
“What?” he asked. “Why would I take it? You take it.”
She looked at him pityingly. “I can’t take it. I barely got in here, there is no way I’m getting out with ThutoCo technology. But you can.”
“Why would I?” he snapped, saying it before thinking.
“Because you’re in this now,” she said holding the chip toward him.
“No, I’m not, not yet. I don’t know you or why you think I should be involved, but I’m not in anything,” he stated, not sounding nearly as firm as he hoped.
“You are,” she reiterated.
“Maybe I’ll just call security, give them whatever this is,” he said as he picked the chip out of her hand.
“You could, but you won’t,” she said with cool confidence, knowing something he didn’t.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because it’s not what your parents wanted,” she stated, and Moss felt as though he had been pushed off a cliff.
“What?” he heard himself mutter. “My parents are dead.”
“No shit,” Ynna barked a laugh that sent a cold chill skittering down his spine. “But they were a part of this. Shit, they’re basically the cause of this. And they wanted you to be also when the time was right. And the time will never be righter than now.”
“You knew them?” Was all he could force from his lips. It had been so long since he had seen those flashlights in the night. So long since he had seen his parents.
“Yes,” Ynna said softly and put a human hand on his. “They wanted this for you.” He knew it was the truth. He felt as though he should doubt her, but he knew. The fact that this strange person had known his parents made more sense to him than anything the ThutoCo representatives had told him. Thousands of questions poured into his mind at once. He wanted to sit this woman down and ask her everything about his parents, the company he worked for, and the outside world. He felt moved to be a part of whatever this was. Leave this place and never look back. He was jarred from this by another loud noise and flashing red lights.
“Security alert! Please remain in your hex and await further instruction,” a synthesized voice commanded through the speaker in his room.
“Oh, shit, I thought I would have more time,” Ynna said, terror plain across her face. “Meet me at the Long-Legged Spinners at 02:00 hours,” she ordered and Moss realized he still held the chip in his hand. “Here, let’s wake you up.” Ynna pressed her robotic hand to the implant point at the base of his skull, one of her eyes going black and causing his vision to flicker. When she was finished with whatever she was doing to him, she darted across the room, pressed the metal hand on the door panel and was gone before Moss could even react. After a moment, he got his bearings and pursued her to the door which had shut instantly upon her departure. He pressed OPEN but the screen read, UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. He was locked in the space amidst flashing red. He knew his life had changed.
Chapter 3
After a minute, the flashing red light stopped, and the normal lighting returned. He looked down at the chip in his hand. It looked like any other, like the twenty or so assorted ones he had in the drawer next to his workstation. He flipped it over in his hand, contemplating what had just happened, and still not entirely believing it.
He had a headache. He knew he should log back into work but guessed that most people had probably logged out too when they heard the alert. Hundreds of miles away, in toxic fields, solar farms, and mines, drudges were standing as statues frozen in time—gargoyles of the technological age.
Moss rubbed the back of his neck. His implant bothered him more than ever. He looked at the clock display at his workstation. 10:23 a.m. There was still so much of the day left and he did not know what to do with himself. He was tempted to simply hand the chip over to security when they arrived, but he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t tell what he wanted to d
o anymore.
Call Gibbs, he thought, having programmed his friend’s hex number such that he could simply place the call by name. “The employee you are trying to reach is currently experiencing a security alert. Do you wish to attempt an override? Your call will be monitored for security purposes. ThutoCo takes the safety of its employees seriously.” Moss ended the transmission and sat in silence. He thought about Ynna. The anger, desperation, and intensity of her eyes. He wanted to see her again. He wanted to know what this was all about, but more than anything, he wanted to know more about his parents.
The panel on his door buzzed and Moss hurried to jam the chip into the drawer of chips.
PLEASE BE AWARE. BURBSEC ENTERING IN 5, 4, 3, 2, 1….
And the door slid open. Two BurbSec officers entered, covered head to toe in black fibermail mesh topped with gray plate armor. The ThutoCo logo was emblazoned on their shoulders and nothing more than their faces were exposed to let one know they were people rather than machines—though, with the helmets closed, they would be nearly indistinguishable. Kingfisher particle beam pistols hung on their belts, clicking ominously against their leg armor.
The first face which entered was that of a man Moss didn’t recognize. Bearded, with suspicious eyes and a scar on his forehead, he looked around the room, analyzing everything. Issy followed behind and gave a quick wave to Moss who hurried over.
“What’s all this?” he whispered.
“We don’t know much more than you: data breach. But we are doing a room by room check. It’ll probably take all day,” she told him and looked up at him with a small smile.
Retinal analysis, he heard in his mind’s ear. It was like that of Issy’s voice, but different and foreign, as though he was hearing her speak to him underwater. The realization of what this meant struck him. He had not understood what Ynna had meant when she said, “wake you up,” but it was now clear. She had hacked his implant, so he could now hear other’s neural commands. More than the fact that she had set off a burb-wide security alert, the fact that he could do this truly meant that what he had experienced had been real.
Into Neon Page 2