Virology

by Ren Warom

  “These are my friends,” he says as they get close, and she genuinely doesn’t know if he’s talking about the Hornets or the performers, but suspects it may encompass all of them. “We’re all on the same wavelength here.”

  The smallest one, a minute woman with brown hair scraped into a high pony and braided, leans her head on KJ’s shoulder and smiles. “I’m Marnie,” she points to the others. “This is Case, my hub, and Bell, as in the type that rings. KJ here says you need to speak to the bosses. We’ll get you access.”

  Walking with performers warms the entire place to them, the atmosphere relaxing considerably. They even garner a few smiles on the way back to the rear. The change makes Vivid feel a stupid need to warn them, because she can see these are good people, of course they are. Anyone who simply accepts avatars as family is all right in her books.

  “We’re not asking something small here. Or safe.”

  “Yeah,” Case says. “It’s cool. KJ was real with us. Look, we want our avis back. We could pay the tariffs for performances, sure, but for real they’re friends and we don’t want to be part of treating them like fucking slaves. We put in a complaint to Tsai Holdings and it literally went nowhere. I mean, these guys aren’t interested. They’re a big deal in Shanghai, they probably think they can do what they want, and frankly no one’s arguing.”

  “We have an interest in arguing,” Vivid responds firmly.

  The look she gets speaks volumes. “So do we.”

  The circus bosses are a middle-aged couple called Manny and Seb. Seb’s the money man and Manny’s the big personality who leads as ringmaster for every performance. They already have stream images of the main Tsai Holdings building up when they arrive, trying to work out the best ways to approach. They know who the Hornets are from streams coming out of Paris Hub— according to Manny, it’s the only reason they agreed to meet them. After their complaint was ignored, they realized the only way to get their avis back would be to take them, and they figured that was a pipe dream. Until now.

  There are no architectural blueprints of Tsai Holdings available in J-Net when KJ and Sandro go to look, so Manny hooks them up with a jacker friend of his, name of Simone. She has some fairly complex self-built scanning apparatus. Handheld. With Manny tagging along, they take it to the rooftop they were staked out on overnight and scan the main Tsai Holdings tower. On the screen, in ghostly white, all the sub-routes in the building appear; the air con, service corridors and shoots.

  “Well would you look at that,” Manny says. “Beautiful.”

  They plan their incursion for two in the A.M., to give them time to scan for security patterns and shifts, see exactly how many of Tsai Holdings staff remain until late. Ahead of attack time, the contortionists and acrobats will go through the air con with KJ and Sandro, to get into sec rooms and disrupt systems. Then the Hornets and Manny, who’s an ex-strong man and stunt performer, will take everyone else in from the front.

  In anticipation of their part, Sandro and KJ suit up in borrowed acrobat costumes, skin-tight and colourful. Marnie runs her hand across KJ’s torso, the mangled flesh visible in the tight fabric.

  “What happened to you?” she asks, horrified.

  KJ is Viv’s favourite person for many reasons; he might be jumpy and often melodramatic, and he may hide his damage, the mental as well as the physical, but he’s not ashamed about who he is or how he got here. He smiles. Shows her the remains of his ear.

  “I said no, and these are prices I paid.”

  “Worth it?” She looks worried, probably thinking about what her circus is about to do.

  “Of course,” he says. “If I could go back, I’d say it louder. More often. I’d shout it in their faces. Saying no lost me some of my gorgeous looks, but it gave me more to love about myself than I’d ever had before. It also gave me a family. Pretty fair trade-off to be honest.”

  * * *

  Tsai Holdings’ air-con ducts are concealed within the architecture of the building on every level. They have a modern aeration system, the kind hub Corps and landlords have used to minimize issues with hub airflow. Instead of sucking in air to cool the building, they have open airways designed to allow air to move freely through the floors, cooling as it goes.

  Watching through her goggles as the advance team heads in, Vivid finds herself crossing her fingers. The way in for them relies on distraction; a team of tumblers keeping the attention of the bottom-floor security and staff as the others pry off a vent cover and slide in one by one. Sandro opted to go last, worried he wouldn’t fit. He does, though he looks uncomfortable going in feet first, his face all screwed up with concentration.

  Luck, she sends to them all.

  You too, KJ sends back.

  They’ve given the advance team an hour to get ahead before they move in. Vivid counts the seconds between one and two A.M., leaving her IM wide open just in case, all set to go in guns blazing and rescue the hell out of the advance team if need be. At ten to the hour, KJ sends word they’re in the sec rooms. He says Sandro doesn’t like the look of the cycling speeds on the systems, wants them to move early. Just in case.

  The only approach to Tsai Holdings’ open-plan reception hall is brightly lit, so they’re going in as a roaming entertainment group, all of the Hornets dressed in performance gear of one kind or another. Vivid has spangled stunt clothes on, black leather with glitter. It’s too tight, rubs at her thighs, but she’s enjoying the sheer gonzo daftness of how they get into the building too much to care, laughing as she gets her weapon out and firing before anyone can ask what the hell they’re doing here. It’s glorious. Brings sharp, aching memories back of the old days, of crazy shit they’d do to make ends meet. The sheer joy of invention and desperation colliding.

  By the time building security pick their jaws up from the carpet and get their act together to fight back, they’ve managed to race to the seventh floor, scattering bullets like glitter. And that’s where security keeps them, cut off from the exits and crouched for piecemeal protection behind the thin partition walls. Snatching swift glances to gauge positions, Vivid fires off shots with a gun borrowed from a circus sharpshooter. Chunks of carpet explode around her, stinging as they strike her bare face. Sharp splinters of plastic partition embed themselves into the meat of her back and buttocks, little niggles of pain.

  She waits for something to give, not knowing what it’ll be.

  When the break moment arrives it’s backwards, paradoxical, outside of any expectation she had of miracles turning the tide in their favour. Tsai Holdings blacks out. Lights gone. Systems down. The clicking sound of doors unlocking all around them. A wholesale destruction of Tsai’s systems.

  What’s happening? she yells to anyone listening. Gets so many replies she has to douse them all and focus in on KJ. Ask again.

  He’s laughing so hard he can barely talk. Literally we were trying to jack in and one of the performers comes over and pours an entire litre bottle of green tea over the innards of the system desk. It pretty much exploded in our faces. I think I singed my eyebrows off.

  She wants to ask how, to question, to get a grip on what the fuck just happened, but there’s no time. The lights flicker on, illuminating frozen guards, guns temporarily lowered, waiting for instructions they’ll never get. Their comms have gone dark. Vivid looks over at Manny’s strong folk and stunt performers. Finds them up and moving in neat lines, blasting away at security who, left to their own devices, abandon all delicacy, shooting to kill or cripple. It’s fair enough, their jobs are on the line, all they can do to keep them is annihilate the people who’ve managed to get past them and into their building. And this is where the strong folk come in most useful, picking up whole, heavy table units to fling at the guards.

  The tables slam through bodies, cracking limbs, pulverizing faces to red ruin and dark bruises. And they take down dozens. More effective than bullets. Than knives. An exercise in brutal efficiency. In this way, they barge up the tower, one floor at a time. Shit
. Of all the stories Vivid might live to tell, this is the one no one will believe. She barely believes it: the day we jacked and overran a Corp with circus performers and iced tea sounds no less than ludicrous. Nonetheless, here she is, strong folk on the left, stunt performers on the right— acrobats in the fucking air ducts.

  Ludicrous.

  They sweep the corridors thoroughly as they go, tying any remaining staff into their chairs. Trying to leave as few dead bodies in the wreckage of the offices as possible. The aim here is not to kill, it’s to get to the labs, find the system the disconnection was distributed through and try to reverse it.

  Get the avis out.

  The labs take up the whole centre of their floor, a secured, multi-faceted set of units with a single corridor running the whole way around. Every code-locked entry on that corridor is barred by teams of guards in protective gear. Nothing like a welcoming party. This close to the labs, to possibly saving their avis, no one is about to quit. Backing out to the level below, they grab up some of the heavy tables as shields and go back, splitting to two groups, one going left, the other right. Tables at the forefront then, they plough the way. The corridor isn’t wide enough for security to evade the battering rams; they end up squashed, trapped, locked in. It’s like shooting fish in barrels.

  When the corridor is clear, the guards removed to the floor below, they focus attention on the labs. Inside, the few workers who stayed late have dropped everything to stare out of the reinforced windows. None of them looks much motivated to open the doors, and in the sec room, KJ and Sandro confirm their worst-case scenario: lab security is not only separate, it’s controlled from within.

  What do we do?

  Marnie thinks she’s small enough to get in through the air con. They have a smaller system for the labs. Bit cramped, but doable.

  What then? She’s not a J-Hack.

  No, but she used to be a pickpocket.

  You’re kidding.

  Nope. How about you get some distraction on?

  Get your arse here and help then.

  It takes less than fifteen minutes for KJ, Sandro and the circus acrobats to get to lab level, Marnie making her way down through the air con from the roof. She keeps in contact via IM right to the moment she gets to the exit duct. All exit ducts open from both sides, with clips. She keeps them informed by IM as she works carefully to unclip the grate without making a sound. Then she’s in, light-footed and on the hunt for a likely target.

  Considering the lab workers aren’t expecting one of their attackers to be inside, she finds one with unsurprising ease. All the violence they’ve wreaked getting up here, and the best moments are these: iced tea on a circuit board and the slender fingers of an acrobat plucking a keycard so swift and silent she might as well be the wind. If they don’t rename the circus after this, Vivid will eat her fucking nipple tape.

  * * *

  Once in, the labs are easy to control. Lab workers aren’t up for a fight; they just want to go home. All except one who didn’t even seem to notice the ruckus. He’s absorbed in his work in the main lab, carefully labelling vials and stashing them in a fridge. Vivid places a hand on his shoulder. He reacts as if she’s shot him, the vials he was putting away scattering the floor. They bounce and skitter, hitting her legs.

  She reaches out to him.

  “Hey. Hey. It’s okay.”

  He blinks up at her through expensive glasses, and it hits her: Exec Pharm. These guys are the geniuses. She side-eyes the floor, the vials. What’s in them? Is he the cage culprit?

  “That what I think it is?” She demands. “Disconnect?” She looks for a name tag. Anything. He’s not rocking any form of ID. He’s so secret he’s not official. Fuck. “And who are you?”

  Startled green eyes rake across her face, looking for hell alone knows what. “Keel,” he says, throwing the word out. “Who are you? Why are you here? Does Evelyn know?”

  “Hell no, hon. Did you create the drug to cage the avis?”

  He looks distracted again. “Of course. No one wants them.”

  “Who the hell told you that?”

  “Who would need to? It’s obvious.”

  She grabs his chin, forcing his face up. “Beg to differ. Everyone here in this damn room apart from you wants their avi back. No cages. No tariffs. No taking the piss. They’re private property. If you didn’t buy them from us you had no right to them.”

  He frowns. “They were property of Fulcrum.”

  “Fulcrum fell, shug. Did you not see the fucking streams?” KJ interrupts from somewhere behind, riding his bitchiness hard. Vivid would cheer, but she’s too busy sitting shotgun on the selfsame derision.

  She rolls her eyes at Keel’s look of confusion. How can anyone not get this? “Seeing as that clearly flew over your head,” she says, trying to be calm and failing like Keel’s grasp on basic reasoning. “Fulcrum falling means we own our avis by default. Give them the fuck back.”

  Keel sighs. Frustration. Irritation. His gaze drops to the ground, to the vials. He picks one up. “If it was this,” he says. “If it was administered to the flesh, then maybe I could reverse it. But I digitized it. I turned it into code. I can’t just undo that. It would take as long to figure out how to undo it as it did to do it.”

  Vivid’s heart plummets to the fucking floor. “That’s not possible.”

  “Nonetheless it’s true. Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  He goes to leave, but she grabs his arm. “Oh no you don’t. I know the Pharm who made the original. We’re going to go and find her, and then you’re going to help her fix this.”

  Keel blinks. “But I don’t want to.”

  “Well I didn’t want to have my avi ripped from my fucking head,” she snarls in his face. “But we don’t always get what we fucking well want, do we? Life’s a circus, pal.” She turns to Sandro then. “You know what to do. This bitch took fucking liberties. I say we take some back. I say we plunder the shit out this Corp and raze it to the ground. Show her what happens when you take shit without asking.”

  “J-Hack revenge. Cold. Real cold. I love it. Shall we make a few choice donations in her name?”

  “Oh let’s. And before you burn her files, make sure you remove this fucker’s files to take to Volk. If anyone can jack a drug locking a few billion cages, it’ll be her.”

  Sandro and KJ working together take roughly ninety minutes to pulverize Tsai Holdings’ systems, releasing incriminating evidence of dodgy deals, stealing Keel’s notes, and doing creative, thoughtful acts of kindness with all of its money, including some accounts Evelyn Tsai probably thought she’d managed to keep secret.

  Job done, they leave the Corp virtually smoking in their wake and drop the circus folk home, swapping hugs and taking their stream deets to keep in touch because friends who bring down Corps together stay together. They might never meet again, but they’ll talk, always. And the second Volk knows how to crack the cages open, these good folk will have their avis back first. That’s an easy promise to make, because without these good folk, they’d still be sat on a ’scraper-top, waiting for a window that might never come.

  Turning back to Earth after leaving Shanghai is weird. Homeward bound, ocean bound; for the Resurrection, for Volk, Vivid thinks back to when she wondered if they’d get through this alive. Well, they’re alive. Most of them anyway. Is that a victory? Considering the cages remain locked and may do so for weeks longer, she can’t call it with any kind of accuracy. But it feels good to have acted. Feels good to have left Tsai Holdings crushed.

  The only thing she wishes for as they descend through space, back toward the pale curve of Earth’s atmosphere, is to be a fly on the wall, watching Evelyn fucking Tsai wake up to find her empire in ruins.

  In a New York Minute…

  Gunshots. The smash of glass, falling all around him. The roar of fury, and then gold smearing his vision as Bear leaps over his head. What the hell has Amiga done? Shock can’t process it. It’s not like her to react. She respo
nds. She thinks. Has she lost her damn mind? Where are the others? Deuce would have stopped this. Reaching out for them, he finds them mere seconds behind. Seconds too late.

  Then Zenada steps down from her prison, and shoves her fingers into his head.

  It’s a strange sensation. All pressure, probably too much pain to process. If he were any more human or less Emblem, he’d pass out. He can hear her in there as well as feel her, digging in. Hunting. Until her fingertips touch his drive and she launches in like a rocket, all sharp edges, strength and that oh-so-familiar bitter lemon taste, the one that accosted him briefly in Slip mere days ago, but so much stronger. Screaming danger, and hell yeah she’s all danger. All power. But this bitch, she’s as dangerous outside Slip as inside. Way more dangerous than him.

  Shock shivers violently. Her fingers are hot and cold in his head, his mind. His body, suddenly too acutely aware of everything, ripples with pain like heat and heat like pain, indistinguishable, consuming every thought but one: is she trying to unplug him now? Hasn’t she guessed there’s no way to now? He thought she was smarter than that. She’s wasting so much time doing pointless shit. Maybe she just wants to hurt him.

  “Get the fuck away from him!”

  An Amiga-sized projectile slams into Zenada, tearing her fingers from his head; they leave icy trails of agony on the way out. The Hornets rush past, grabbing Zen’s arms to hold her back. He tries to talk, but his voice won’t work. He needs to tell them—she only looks like she’s restrained but bits of her are still inside him, fighting for precedence, that bitter lemon taste soaking his drive, and he knows she’s waiting. Only waiting. They need to get away. They need to run.

  Ravi drops down beside him, his knees by Shock’s shoulder, those gentle hands of his moving aside Shock’s hair. He hisses. Breathes, “Jeez, Shock. Shit.”