by HD Smith
What I’d gotten was so much less than I’d expected. Today would be no different.
Because I’d never lived with the woman who birthed me, I often wondered what it would be like to know a relative. To see someone with my matching genome. To have a place outside of my drab corporate housing that I might call home. But like many of the other lower-tier House Cortez members, I had little choice in my life. I was either left in a stagnant job or constantly moved around at their will. And because of my station, I wasn’t allowed to find a partner. If I met someone and found a mutual attraction, the House would move one of us before a bond could form. Cohabitation arrangements had to be sanctioned, requested, and authorized. Lower-tier employees weren’t allowed to register interest until after fifteen years of service, and then a genetic match would be made to further House Cortez initiatives. At twenty-four, I wasn’t eligible for consideration in the program for another seven years, and because I had limited magical ability, I’d most likely be turned down once I was eligible.
These restrictions were my life, whether I wanted them to be or not.
I was lucky in one regard: House Cortez was one of the few Houses that needed skilled non-magical talent. Their industry focused on magic-infused products, and their corporations ran experiments to determine the efficacy of their products on individuals with little to no magical aptitude. Except my absorption ability was through the roof, and my tolerance was nonexistent. Most temp tattoos would kill me if I tried to use them, so I never got anything good. I’d finally found a job I liked at K12. Once the head of HR realized I had an aptitude for data analysis, she moved me out of my boring data entry job and allowed me to prepare, file, and process all the corporate paperwork for the lab. It wasn’t glamorous, and I was sure she’d assigned me to do it so she wouldn’t have to, but it was different, and I got a lot of experience navigating the inane corporate bureaucracy that was House Cortez.
That was all gone now. I was once again a cog in the machine. An undesirable worker with no recognized skills. No family. No future.
A board at the entrance to the center flashed my stats as I walked in the door.
[Welcome Employee: X321392 (Genevieve Harlow, MI Data Entry Level 0)!
Please take a seat in Section 9L.
Your wait time is expected to be 14 minutes.
House Cortez expects compliance by all corporate citizens.
House Cortez reserves the right to expel any corporate citizen at any time.
HR/CC Memo EX13149.
Have a nice day!]
The same notification flashed on my Link. I scanned the area and found Section 9L. Several of my fellow K12 employees were already seated. I wanted to turn and run when I noticed the only open seat was by Vera, my least favorite co-worker at Mage Ink. I sat down, hoping this wasn’t a portent of what was to come.
“Why did you wear your scrubs?” Vera asked.
I didn’t respond.
Vera continued to talk. “Dr. Lyle got fired. Something about the test pods not being properly calibrated and shady black market deals.”
What? Dr. Lyle had been fired? Was that why we were all being reassigned?
“Is that why we’re here? Has the lab been shut down?” I asked.
“Have you been living under a rock?” Vera asked, but didn’t wait for me to answer. “House Peacekeepers shut the lab down this morning, because Dr. Lyle was making Concentrated Myst Extract—and preparing to sell it on the black market.”
Because I’d spent most of the last six months processing all the lab’s paperwork, I knew the machines were generating Concentrated Myst Extract, a volatile substance that had been banned on more than one Known World. My boss had told me the CME was a normal byproduct of the test pods and that the amount created was within normal parameters for any study. Had she lied to me? Or had she not been told the truth by Dr. Lyle?
Mage Ink’s primary product was temporary tattoos, which were made from myst-infused ink stamped into a known spell pattern. There were three types of tats: novelty, advanced, and elite. The ink on each tat was either instant reaction or triggered reaction—and both required myst to activate.
K12 had been tasked with running Mage Ink’s Reduced Myst Study. It was research into the effects of using temporary tattoos in low-myst environments. Extracting the myst from the test pods was what generated the excess CME. Of course, all the tests were inconclusive because none of the temp tattoos could work without some myst to activate them. A spell was only as good as the myst it took to run it and the magic user’s ability to channel myst.
For triggered or delayed reaction tats, myst and a force of will were required to activate them. If a user’s will wasn’t strong enough, a spark could be used. Sparks were expensive as hell, which put delayed reaction style spells outside the reach of most corporate citizens. But even with an instant tat, myst was necessary.
Why House Cortez thought they needed to prove that was beyond me.
Not that any of this affected me. Only elite magic users had a strong enough natural force of will to spark most tattoos. People with off-the-charts absorption, tolerance ability, and unique characteristics that let them pool a magical spark in their blood. People with this ability could instantly spark any delayed activation or dormant tat. That would never be me.
I thought about what Vera had said about black market deals. What made CME worth selling? Was it because it was dangerous?
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
Vera rolled her eyes and sighed. “Sometimes, Gene, I think you don’t pay attention at all.”
I fucking hated that she called me Gene, but I had long ago given up trying to get her to call me by my name.
“Just so we’re clear,” I said, “all this happened this morning within the last two hours, right?”
“Yeah. That’s why you have to make friends with the night security. So, anyway, six House special forces PKs stormed the place around 04:00. They took vid-snaps, locked down the entire building, and told security to go home. Apparently, in the quantity they found onsite at the lab, CME is dangerous. We could have been blown up at work. They’ve put bomb dampeners around the building until a special team can come in and secure it.”
There was no way my boss had known the amount of CME was dangerous. That would explain why they’d shut us down.
“And the PKs are there now, guarding the place?” I asked.
Vera shook her head. “No, they just locked it down. Something about needing specially trained bots to go over the place first and secure things.”
“Did they keep anyone to help with the clean-up effort?”
“Not anyone I know. You have to be able to activate a specialty advanced triggered tat to neutralize your static or something. No one in the lab qualifies.”
“Did Dr. Lyle intentionally create the CME, or just try to sell it after the fact?” I asked.
I found it hard to believe a senior scientist with Mage Ink would deliberately break company policy and produce a dangerous substance to sell for profit. Scientists at Mage Ink were House Cortez elite. They had all the advantages of corporate life. Why would he risk that for a few hundred thousand credits?
Vera said they fired him, though, so what else could it have been? I’d never heard of any House firing one of their tenured scientists. I’m sure a few had been placed on assignments they hated, but Houses had too much invested to let their lead scientists go to another House.
“What does it matter if he intentionally did it or not, Gene?” Vera said. “He’s in the wind. No one has seen him since Friday, and because of the raid on the lab, Dr. Monroe decided to move us all to his other R&D projects.”
“So we’re just being reassigned to a local Mage Ink study?”
Vera shrugged.
Dr. Monroe was Dr. Lyle’s boss, which made him my boss too. So it made sense that he’d make some of these decisions. Of course that wouldn’t change my situation. I was still getting pulled from a job I liked and stu
ck in another dead-end data entry gig.
Taking out my Link, I searched Dr. Lyle’s name on the stream. The first article in the search results was ridiculous; just from the preview I could tell it was a half-baked theory with little merit. I rolled my eyes at the source: the Dark Stream. DS was a huge site that catered to the masses. It had stories so farfetched I didn’t understand how anyone could believe them.
I skimmed the summary.
[Dr. Victor Lyle—the Toxic Waste Mad Man—was fired for gross incompetence, theft, and illegal disposal of hazardous materials. Our underworld sources accuse the good doctor of supplying illegal synth-h to underage clubbers looking for a walk on the wild side. He’s also been implicated in the recent string of faith-healer deaths. Our sources tell us he’ll be extradited off world to be prosecuted…]
Unbelievable. The number of lies in the summary was staggering. First, the faith-healer deaths were tied to a failed acolyte that confessed over a week ago; second, the synth-h raids were last month and were tied back to another House, not House Cortez. And Toxic Waste Mad Man? Where were these people getting their information?
DS wasn’t concerned with facts, only the sensationalism that kept people reading.
The next search result was from a reputable source, the Worlds Press.
[Dr. Victor Lyle has been subpoenaed to appear before a magistrate today at City Center. Mage Ink has disavowed him and refuses to provide counsel or information about his whereabouts.]
I clicked the link to get more info.
[Reports of a toxic spill at K12’s lab were exaggerated; however, Mage Ink has confirmed that a minimal amount of non-recyclable waste was discovered during a building inspection at Dr. Lyle’s research and development site on Friday. The investigation continues.]
If Vera was right, not even Worlds Press had the latest info.
There was a chip code and a professional snap-vid of Dr. Lyle from at least twenty years ago attached to the article. The dark brown hair, single line of House tattoos under his right eye, and smartly trimmed goatee was nothing like his look now: graying and slightly balding with a full beard and a new line of House tats—a swirl of glyphs stretching from under his right eye to below his jaw.
The chip code could be used by businesses to determine if he’d been in their store recently, which would let them notify Peacekeepers and submit video surveillance if they chose. No one ever did.
Vera’s voice pulled my attention back to her.
“I really hope we’re not sent off world,” she said, “because when that happens, you just never know what kind of job you’re going to get.”
“I thought you said Dr. Monroe was having us transferred to his other R&D projects?”
“Yeah, but he runs the entire division, and Tau isn’t the only place House Cortez has labs.”
I stopped listening. Vera didn’t have any real knowledge of our new jobs, not if she was worried about being sent off world, and she could prattle on for hours about nothing. I’d had two years of her at K12 and I was done. I checked the time on my Link. It had only been five minutes since I entered the reassignment center, but the counter had been adjusted to a twenty-minute wait time; then it changed to thirty before I looked away.
Ugh, kill me now.
“I mean we’re almost twins,” Vera said.
What is she talking about?
“Except that one time,” she continued, “when you used that unfortunate hair straightener spell and it looked like your head was covered in dandelion fluff. But thankfully that only lasted a half hour, while we were on break.”
By unfortunate hair straightener spell, she really meant the time she’d “accidentally” pissed off a co-worker who’d decided to get even with her by lying in wait outside the restroom to slap her with a novelty tat for clown hair. Only I was the one who’d walked out of the restroom first.
Thankfully it was so low-level it didn’t kill me, but the other worker was reassigned. Mage Ink forbid us to use tattoos while on the job.
Vera was choosing to forget the entire episode had all been her fault.
“So,” she continued, “I was still totally able to use you when they accused me of slacking.”
“What?”
Vera chuckled. “Whenever I slacked off at work, I’d have them check the footage of you working to prove I hadn’t slacked off. It worked every time. Anyway, we’re both really crap with magic, so maybe we'll get sent somewhere together.”
I just looked at her. What the hell had started this conversation? Right—she’d called us twins. First, we weren’t twins. I had cute curly brown hair. Vera had mousy brown hair with kinky small curls, but styled all wrong for her face. Plus her eyes were green, and mine were hazel. Of course, neither of us had House tats, because our magic was non-existent.
Oh-my-fucking-Lucy. We were totally twins.
How had I never noticed this?
“Wait,” I said, finally realizing what she’d just said. “You used my work footage to prove you weren’t slacking? How?”
“Yeah, because other than my awesome beauty mark, we are like the same person, especially on the vid-streams.”
“The surveillance would tag that it was me,” I argued.
Vera shook her head. “Your chip is shielded somehow from the sensors. I think it’s because the lab system was so old, but who knows. Anyway, if you were the only one in the room it wouldn’t record, but you were always with the other workers, so it got you just fine, and”—she pointed back and forth between herself and me—“twins. It worked every time.”
Un-fucking-believe-able. She’d been using the video of me working to prove that she had been working, when she wasn’t. That was probably why she always sat near me. It also explained why my reviews were always tense sessions with my supervisor and Dr. Lyle.
I turned away and tried to ignore the idiot beside me. If they sent me off world with this crazy, I was going to quit—okay, not quit exactly. No one could quit. Barring being expelled and left to rot on the streets, once you belonged to a House, you were stuck with it. If they wanted to get rid of you, they could sell your contract to another House, which was easier than expulsion. But because of my issues with magic, no other House would want me, not even for their dead-end jobs that no one else wanted. My only way out, other than death, was to renounce my allegiance to House Cortez and declare my plan to petition Atlas Corporation for acceptance in their Scholar program; but to do that I’d have to join the Shamanic Order of Pre-Acolyte Herans and become a woo-woo faith healer and literally beg for credits on the street.
No, thank you. Giving up my body and living the rest of my life on a private stream wasn’t for me. I’d take my chances with House Cortez first.
I was also fairly sure you had to have faith to be a faith healer, and a lot of credits. They didn’t let just anyone join the collective.
It wasn’t like they would take me anyway. No one wanted a Wanderer-born like me. There was too much superstition that Wanderers, those without magic, and their offspring could cause others to lose their magic. In a world where your place in society was literally tied to your ability to manipulate myst, those without it might as well be dead.
The Wanderers couldn’t strip someone of magic. If they could, that might be used as a weapon, but that didn’t stop people from believing the stories and shunning anyone who might be tainted by that fate.
I reached into my pocket to retrieve my ear-clip, which I needed to listen to the audiobook on my Link. Of all my shortcomings, the silver allergy was the worst. It prevented me from getting any implants, because they all used silver. If only I’d been born to someone other than a Wanderer couple, I’d have been vaccinated at birth. Instead, I had a silver allergy in a world where silver was everywhere.
I’m honestly surprised I survived my childhood.
I rubbed my temples and tried to quit spiraling into a self- inflicted woe-is-me session. It wasn’t fair and it sucked, but I was sure the corporate recruiter wou
ld tell me it could be worse—like being a Wanderer.
Some days I wished I had been a Wanderer, because that would have meant growing up with my parents on Canis, not living at the whim of House Cortez.
I glanced over at Vera. She was still chattering nonsense. I turned on the audiobook I’d been listening to earlier this morning. A good way to drown her out.
I tuned in to another episode in The Adventures of 22nd Century Private Investigator Mason Murdoch. The good ol’ days before magic, when the Earth was slowly drowning in plastic and other man-made materials. When Houses weren’t gods, and countries ran the world. The time before wormholes were discovered, and humans relocated to the newly terraformed Known Worlds.
A simpler time.
I watched the people as they went by. My section was full of low-level people like me. We were easy to spot because most of us had one single visible permanent tattoo, or in rare cases like me and Vera, no tattoo at all. The other exception in our section was a lanky guy in his late twenties who was biting his nails. He had a set of very faded House tats. This was unusual, because faded tattoos generally meant you’d been expelled from a House after attaining enough clout to get the additional ink. And if that happened, no one else would want you. I didn’t remember seeing him at the lab. Maybe he was from a different House Cortez company.
I straightened when a Peacekeeper walked by. He was a standard-sized male C-Series mech, 2.15 meters in height, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. He wore the green and blue stripes of House Cortez on the band around his full visor helmet. His fatigues, long-sleeved athletic shirt, gloves, and combat boots were the typical stark black that made all Peacekeepers intimidating.
His head swiveled as he scanned the faces in the reassignment center. I surveyed the crowded room, curious if anyone looked nervous. The lanky guy sitting two seats down from Vera was still distractedly biting his nails. He looked up when the Peacekeeper stopped a few feet away from me.