by D L Young
Contents
BONUS CONTENT
1 - Winner Take Nothing
2 - Dezmund
3 - Hello, Salaryman
4 - Pissing Contest
5 - Kick
6 - Blayze Doesn't Serve
7 - Training the Crew
8 - Graveyard Shift
9 - Exit Strategy
10 - Bailed On
11 - Shock Wand Relief
12 - Just Because
13 - Lies
14 - New Fulton
15 - Pushing Tommy
16 - Terrible at Goodbyes
17 - Washington Square Parley
18 - Foolish, Foolish Woman
19 - No Sellout
20 - Nice Try, Salaryman
21 - Confession
22 - Killer Machines
23 - Raining Bots
24 - Help
25 - Broken Chains
26 - Time to Get Out
27 - Special Agent Nguyen
BONUS PREVIEW Cyberpunk City Book Four - Mindjacked
Mindjacked Chapter 1 - Guest Lounge
Mindjacked Chapter 2 - Playing with Fire
Acknowledgments
Copyright
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If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul to lose.
— Charles Bukowski
1 - Winner Take Nothing
“Mr. Wonderful’s here.” Zanne the waitress leaned in close as she removed an empty glass from the table.
Maddox sighed at the news. And it had been such a nice evening too. He scanned the bar’s main room. “Where?”
“He’s still up front,” she said. “Asking if you’re here.”
“He alone?” Maddox asked.
The waitress cocked an eyebrow. “Is he ever?”
She leaned in closer, her yellow dreadlocks nearly touching him. Fishnet thighs pressed against the tabletop. “You want me to get rid of him?”
Maddox shook his head. “Don’t bother.”
“You got it, boss. Do you need anything else?” she asked, still so close he felt her breath warm on his face. “Anything I can give you?” she added suggestively.
“I’m good, thanks.”
Her flirtations had begun months ago, when Maddox had bought the place. He’d never reciprocated, but it didn’t seem to bother her or lessen her own advances.
Drink tray in her hand, she sauntered away as Tommy arrived. The kid slid into the booth and gawked at the waitress’s swaying hips.
“I don’t know why you don’t hit that, bruh. I would so hit that if I were you. I would so, so hit that.”
Maddox lit a cigarette, blew smoke. “I’m trying to run a professional joint here, kid. That kind of thing’s bad for business.”
“Bad for business,” Tommy echoed, nodding sagely. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
Maddox surveyed the bar from his corner booth. Foot-high holos projected from inlaid devices on each table. Talking heads of newsreaders. Brazilian soccer matches. Gangbangs from live sex feeds.
The walls were set to a beach scene from Bali. A vast turquoise seascape. Towering palm trees, fronds fluttering in the breeze. Other nights featured a vast Andean plain, rust brown and rocky with distant snowcapped peaks. Or a street scene from another city. Jakarta or Kobe or Moscow.
Winner Take Nothing had an early-evening crowd and a late crowd. The early arrivals were well dressed, wealthy, and snobbish. Company types, mostly. Well-compensated corporati who spent their days in highfloor executive suites and board rooms. The one-percenters, just as demanding and self-important as he remembered them from his brief tenure in the corporate world. They bitched about prices and grabbed the waitresses’ asses when they got drunk. But they spent money like water and never broke out into fistfights. So all things considered, they were a pretty easy crowd to handle, once you got past their pretensions.
The late crowd came from a different segment of City society, one just as affluent but organized along different lines than the matrixed structure of a global corporation. This crowd had no vice presidents, no board members, no highfloor government officials. They were the City’s criminal class, its elite underworld of prosperous embezzlers, narcos, pimps, smugglers, and data thieves. They mixed well with the patrons from the legitimate world. In fact, for some it was difficult to distinguish the criminals from the noncriminals. Not for Maddox, though. His underworld brethren might dress like highfloor corporati; they might speak like them, even act like them. But the lawless among his patrons always had a slightly different air about them. A kind of vibe only the streetwise emitted, like some pheromone others of their kind recognized with ease. A wariness, or maybe awareness was the right word. A perpetual awareness, a sharp sense of their surroundings. The keen, never-resting perception of a predator, constantly searching out prey, sizing up the herd to find its weakest members.
At half past ten o’clock, the bar’s patrons seemed evenly distributed between the two crowds. The early arrivals had ebbed, their numbers replaced with a flow of latecomers. The white-collar types who stayed later got a thrill out of mixing with the City’s upper-crust gangsters. It was part of the bar’s appeal, Maddox had come to understand. Want to rub elbows with the City’s criminal elite? Hit Winner Take Nothing around midnight.
The bar was the first aboveboard business Maddox had owned in his life—a legal milestone in his otherwise illegitimate career as a datajacker. After a short stint at a biotech firm—the only legit job he’d ever held prior to being a bar owner—he’d gone back to datajacking, the illegal trade he’d been immersed in since his teens. With sweat and grit and a bit of good luck, he’d managed to find his sweet spot in the black market. The jobs had begun to roll in, and so had the money. With the cash piling up, investing in a legit business had seemed like a good call. At thirty-two, he was old for a datajacker. Those in his profession rarely made it to thirty before getting caught or killed. At some point he knew he’d have to quit the game and find some other livelihood. So when the bar’s previous owner—an old contact fleeing the country to dodge a bribery charge—had offered to sell Maddox the place for pennies on the dollar, the datajacker had jumped at the chance.
A throng of new customers poured through the main room’s entryway, and the low murmur of conversation grew into a restless din of raised voices. Dezmund Parcells—or Mr. Wonderful as the staff had sarcastically dubbed him—marched into the bar with all the discretion of a street parade. Overdressed as always in a three-piece suit complete with gold-chained timepiece tucked into a pocket, Dezmund was trailed by his entourage, a dozen or so of his crew and hangers-on. Employees and sycophants who followed him everywhere, laughing at his every joke and buzzing about him like moths around a streetlamp. Or flies around shit, Maddox reflected.
“Oh, great,” Tommy sighed, mirroring Maddox’s earlier reaction. “Mr. Wonderful’s here.”
For all the hands he shook as he made his way to the bar, you would have thought Dezmund was running for office. For a moment Maddox considered slipping out of a side exit, but then stubbornly decided against it. This was his place, after all.
As he worked the room, Dezmund glanced furtively in Maddox’s direction a couple times but made no immed
iate move in his direction. That would be too obvious, too needy. Instead, he maneuvered his followers to the bar, where they ordered drinks and he pretended not to notice the tavern’s owner for the next fifteen minutes. Finally, Dezmund made eye contact, feigned surprise, and lifted his drink in the datajacker’s direction. Maddox returned the gesture with a nod.
“Oh, man,” Tommy complained as he noticed Dezmund moving in their direction. “I can’t stand this fook. Look at him. Look how he’s dressed. Like he’s some big shot corporati or something. He’s just a jacker like you and me, this guy.”
“Take it easy,” Maddox said, blowing smoke. “Giving him free rent in your head doesn’t help anything.”
“That another Rooneyism?” this kid asked.
“Saw it on a self-help feed,” Maddox joked.
The kid looked confused for a moment, then chuckled. Six months back—after they’d managed to dodge a frame-up for a terrorist bombing—Maddox had taken on Tommy as his apprentice, the same way Rooney had taken him on way back when. The kid was a quick study and had the innate talent every datajacker needed to handle the demands of virtual space. But he could be a handful at times. If he wasn’t bouncing off the walls with adolescent mania, he was picking Maddox’s brain for hours on end about countermeasures and sledgehammer executables and razorwall applications. Tommy Park, datajacker-in-training, was a bundle of manic energy wrapped in street kid bluster. Maddox sometimes wondered if Rooney had thought the same about him once upon a time.
Dezmund’s retinue followed in his wake as he made his way over, a woman on each arm. Arriving at the table, he removed his specs, handed them to the blonde on his left, and smiled graciously down at Maddox.
“Blackburn,” he said, reaching out a hand. “Good to see you, old friend.”
Maddox half-stood as he shook the proffered hand. “Dez,” he said. “You remember Tommy.” Maddox tilted his head toward the kid.
Dezmund gave Tommy the smallest of nods before fixing his gaze again on Maddox. “How’s the bar business treating you?”
Maddox blew smoke. “Can’t complain. How’s business for you?”
“Couldn’t be better,” Dezmund said. “Then again,” he added, “I guess it could be a bit better if you’d stop undercutting me.”
Maddox held Dezmund’s gaze, tried not to react. “Undercutting you? Not sure I know what you’re talking about.”
Dezmund grinned. “You used to be a better liar, Blackburn.”
“I’ll have to work on that,” Maddox said.
“You’re stealing from me,” Dezmund said, the smile vanishing. “Don’t sit there and deny it.”
“Hey, bruh!” Tommy exclaimed, springing up from his seat. A street instinct from a street kid. Winner Take Nothing was his mentor’s home turf, and you didn’t disrespect someone on their home turf and get away with it. Maddox grasped the kid’s arm, then shook his head at him. Tommy reluctantly took his seat again, glaring at Dezmund like a guard dog ready to pounce on an intruder.
“Last time I checked,” Maddox said, “the black market was a market just like any other, and vendors can bid whatever they want.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit,” Dezmund said. “There’s a difference between bidding low and stealing business, and you know it.”
Maddox did know it. There was a difference. A big difference.
When a potential datajacking gig hit the radar—through either the underground feeds or word of mouth or a paid go-between—the hiring party sometimes sought bids from different crews. Some did this because they were cheap or cash-strapped. These clients invariably went with the lowest bidder. Others simply wanted a price comparison to make sure their first quote wasn’t a rip-off. The bids themselves usually fell into a predictable range. Newbie crews with low cred and not much rep bid low, and the more experienced shops charged a premium for their proven expertise. There were no rules to the bidding process. The black market was a brutally efficient free-for-all, and you played the game at your own risk.
There were, however, standards most datajackers followed, unwritten codes of behavior respected by all. You never sold out another jacker to the cops, for example. If a rival screwed you over, you took care of it yourself. You had their legs broken or you recruited away their best talent or—in extreme cases—you had them knocked off. But you never went to the cops, ever. Another no-no was stealing business with an undercutting bid at the last minute. In competitive situations, you bid what you could afford to, period. You didn’t come in late and quote half the market rate. And if you did that sort of thing often enough, you shouldn’t plan on staying around very long. Disruptive lowballers were swiftly run out of the business by larger established shops with threats of violence or, if that didn’t work, actual violence.
“Let’s talk in my office,” Maddox suggested.
“What’s wrong with right here?” Dezmund countered.
“What’s your damage, bruh?” Tommy snarled. “Show the house some respect or get out of here.”
Dezmund tightened his lips and shook his head disapprovingly. “If this is how you treat all your guests, Blackburn, I’m afraid this place isn’t going to stay in business very long.” Then to Tommy: “You should be careful how you talk to people, kid.”
The kid sprung up from his chair. “You can’t give me orders. You’re not my boss. Why don’t you take your sad-ass crew and get out of—”
“Tommy,” Maddox snapped. “Bring it down a few notches. We’re just having a parley here, yeah?”
By now, much of the conversation in the bar had stopped. Customers and employees peered over at Maddox’s booth with tense, expectant stares.
“Sad-ass crew?” Dezmund said. He half-turned to his entourage. “You hear that? The boy here thinks I’ve got a sad-ass crew.” His gang laughed derisively in response. “And what would you call your crew?” Dezmund asked the kid. “Your two-man crew that has to steal like some starving kid robbing apples from a fruit stand?”
“We’re ten times the jackers any of you are,” the kid shot back.
“You really think so?” Dezmund asked.
“Hells, yeah,” Tommy said defiantly. The kid was in a full-blown froth now.
Dezmund lifted an eyebrow at Maddox. “Care to prove it, then?” He smiled in a way that managed to be at once playful and threatening.
“Prove it how?” Maddox asked.
“You know how,” Dezmund said. “The way we used to way back when.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Why not?” Again the ambiguous smile. “Unless you’re scared.”
Now it was Maddox’s turn to grin. “Let’s do it.”
2 - Dezmund
The suit-and-tied patrons of Winner Take Nothing hadn’t expected to see a real live datajacking contest that night, so when the staff pulled together a couple tables and began to break out decks and trodebands and holo projectors, a wave of excitement ran through the bar. Even the criminal types among the evening’s customers, the thieves and fences and hustlers and black marketeers, became wrapped up in the buzzing anticipation. Most had only seen this kind of thing in movies on the entertainment feeds: an old-school datajacker showdown.
When the staff finished setting up the gear a minute later, the bar’s atmosphere had completely changed. Normally quiet and low-key, Winner Take Nothing had transformed into a noisy, raucous scene, reminding Maddox of the excitable vibe of underground fighting matches.
Dezmund looked over the setup with a critical eye and a knitted brow. “Not exactly top-of-the-line gear, is it? But I suppose we can work with it.”
“All right, then.” Maddox gripped Tommy around the shoulder. “The kid’s ready. Winner buys drinks for the house, yeah?” He made sure this last was loud enough for the entire bar to hear. A chorus of yeahs and all rights and applause filled the air. He glanced at the kid, found Tommy’s eyes wide in shock.
“Me?” the kid gasped. “I thought you were going to—”
“It’s his best versus my best. That’s how these things always go down. You knew that, right?”
“Yeah, sure,” Tommy said hesitantly. “Of course I knew that.” The poor kid looked like he was about to be thrown into a pit of starving lions. Which wasn’t far from the truth, now that Maddox thought about it. In large operations like Dez’s, head-to-head jacker contests were part of the workaday routine. Challenges were thrown down every day, serving as a kind of brutal in-house Darwinism. Those with the best records secured bragging rights and the top spot in a crew’s pecking order. Dez’s top dog would have hundreds of hours of experience in these types of contests. Tommy Park, on the other hand, was a different story. As the only understudy in a two-person shop, the kid’s experience was limited to automated scenarios. The kid had done pretty well in those environments, but Maddox knew taking on another living, breathing person was different. Especially in front of a crowd.
The bar’s patrons applauded and cheered. They were ready for a show. Maddox leaned close to the kid’s ear. “You can do it, kid. Trust me.”
Whether it was the crowd’s urging or his own words that lifted the kid’s spirits, Maddox couldn’t say, but in the next moment a cocky smile came across Tommy’s face. He rubbed his palms together.
“Let’s goooo,” he said, strutting forward, chest out and smiling. Louder applause and cheering broke out as he swung his leg over the chair and sat down.
The kid’s opponent emerged from the back of Dezmund’s retinue. Short and unassuming, she had a bob of sandy-brown hair colored blood red at the tips. Her name was Blayze, an up-and-comer Maddox had heard mentioned more and more lately in datajacking circles. He’d never met her, but word had it she was Dezmund’s top talent. She looked nineteen, twenty at most, making her Tommy’s senior by some five years. Behind a pair of Venturelli specs, her face was relaxed and composed, a tiny island of calm in the excited storm of the bar’s buzzing patrons. She locked eyes with her benefactor, lifting her brows in an unspoken question. Dezmund responded with a small nod: permission granted. The girl then stepped forward to a frenzy of hoots and howls, wearing an oversized leather jacket with a large smiley face covering most of the back. She removed her specs, turned the chair around backwards, then sat down and picked up one of the two trodebands. If she was rattled by the rowdy scene around her, her steely expression betrayed no sign of it.