SINless don’t have to be any more dangerous than your average social failure shooting up a busy street, but it pays to be smarter. Losers and idiots die fast, so those of us that survive the entry process end up with a network of like-minded illegal mercs with talents for murder, mayhem, theft, espionage, and whatever else makes the corporate douchefactories piss their pants.
Which is my point. And Fagging’s.
As a working runner, I’m worth my weight in credits. Or at least this cop’s weight in cleared paperwork. Not quite worth a medal, but definitely a promotion. Big bad Officer Fagan, taking down his very own merc. If he could sweeten the pot with my contacts, he’d skate right from street meat to a desk.
I bet he’d swing his copper-toned dick around for years.
I never did much care for authority. Part of the reason I left home. It made me lippy. More, it made me forget that I was running on empty, which wasn’t doing me any favors. “So let’s get real here,” I told him, drumming my only functional hand on the table. “I die in this box, you haul in a corpse. We both know your bosses want me alive.”
A bit of a stretch, but I was banking on the fact Fagan didn’t know that. Alive meant information, after all. Possible datadump from my chipset, possible informant. Dead means a runner’s chipset goes nova and eats its data. Fuck you, forensic coroners.
“You can stroke your civic cock all day long,” I added, waggling my eyebrows. “Maybe I die while you take your money shot. Maybe my nanos push me over the edge and then you got a fucking necro in your station.” He blanched at that. Smart man. Time was on my side here. Sort of. I mean, I cared if I died, but he didn’t know that.
Most everyday wage slaves figure SINless are one step away from batshit insane anyway, which is more or less true, but we still favor survival over reckless suicide. Whatever else the corps like to say about us, we ain’t in it for the kicks.
Just for the kicks, anyway.
Perspiration rolled down his jaw. He wiped it away with a hand. The hair on his knuckles was thick and wiry. Darker than I expected.
A sausage-link finger jabbed at the air between us. “You talk, but you don’t exist, do you, little girl?” Well, damn. Officer Gorilla-Hands found his courage. “There’s nothing stopping me from jamming a recharge down your throat to keep you stable and hauling you off. You could...” He tried for a snap, but his sweaty digits wouldn’t cooperate. “You could disappear, and who’d come looking? Your illegal pals? Bullshit. You’re the dumb cunt that got caught by street meat.”
All obviously true, which was why I needed him to come at me.
“Okay, Officer Fagan.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “I got a question.”
He frowned. “What?”
Oh, man. It’s like he was asking for it. “How often do you scope out the other guys’ junk in the locker room?”
He held my gaze, drawing on that good ol’ boy macho crap that I bet he practiced on the wife and kids. “Shut up.”
“Ever nail a perp in lockup just ’cause he couldn’t say no?”
The sweat at his jaw dripped to his shirt.
“I bet if you ask nice, your wife’ll peg you tonight.”
His throat moved, flesh rippling under his too-tight collar. “Shut up, bitch.”
I didn’t care if I’d hit a nerve of truth or one his machismo couldn’t handle. It was all the same in the end. I tilted my head. “Tell me, Fagging,” I said, dropping my voice to a conspiratorial octave. “You touch your kids with the same hand you stroke off with?”
That did it. He surged to his feet, chair creaking, bellowing like an enraged bull. I braced, but I wasn’t prepared for him to slam both fists into the table in front of me. The damn thing scooted three inches, spiderwebbed the cement under its metal legs with a sharp crack of sound, and rammed hard into my ribs. My chair slid back. I grunted, adrenaline pouring into synapses already fried to a crisp.
The beefjock was strong. Way stronger than I’d given him credit for.
Stronger, I bet, than anyone expected him to be.
Motherfucker. I’d misjudged the guy.
My smile strained. “Juicer,” I wheezed, sucking in air through ribs that felt like they’d been jackhammered.
His eyes blazed, telegraphing more psychotic rage than I figured he’d normally have in him.
I was wrong. Way wrong. He wasn’t just street meat. I should have noticed the signs sooner – maybe would have, if I weren’t so strung out already. Wide shoulders, thick gut, the kind of heft Lucky would call soft muscle. Testosterone and rage and sideline expertise. His skin was tan, yeah, but now that I’d actually looked, it didn’t look like the kind of color picked up from a tanning bed.
Fagan’s features were all the usual mixes, the standard plethora of genetic grabbag this city bred like cockroaches, but this build, the tone to his skin, and the spittle peppering the desk made me consider black-market gene therapy instead – Māori, maybe, or Samoan; something that culturally favored bulk over lean muscle.
A serious problem.
Gene therapy is capitalistic science – legit in every way except the side effects. Some consumerist test panel took the best parts of a culture they didn’t understand, shoved it into a pill and assumed everything would work like expected. Only it didn’t. Science can isolate the genes, but genes don’t end at skin and bone.
Right around the time the cultural fringe died out as a pure strain, psychologists stopped talking about genetic memory. Critics called it the dying breath of an extinct race. By the time scientists distilled entire cultures down into strands of DNA, there wasn’t anybody around to remember the concept. Until the shit went viral in people too impressionable to handle it.
It was a lot like the brief and bloody fad for “real” pet wolves. They cultivated the raw genetic base into dogs, then farmed them out for major pay to bored fuckheads with more creds than common sense. Who then got a shitload of surprise when originally tame animals turned feral and savaged their owners.
Most pure strains went the way of the wolves ages ago. Only thing keeping native civilizations alive is the gene therapy that doesn’t understand them and some seriously ignorant idolatry from naïve fetishists.
A man like Officer Fagan here probably wanted muscle and a warrior makeup to lord over his small-time beat, and ended up with enough additional testosterone and misplaced cultural fury to kill his brain cells. Not that science cared. Racial memory wasn’t the kind of thing the corporations wanted to waste time disproving. In the spirit of entrepreneurialism, they ignored the evidence, marked the gene pills as all-natural and set it loose.
Fagan didn’t strike me as the homeopathic type, but here we were. All for what? Some extra meat and bragging rights?
Fuck that. His armchair athleticism wasn’t equipped to handle the instinct of a warrior culture murdered by the civilization that sold them, and I’d bet my life that his nanos would overcompensate for the surge of killing fury. That meant if he got angry enough, I’d be paste on the wall of this dingy interrogation room. He’d rip my arms off before I got the cuffs free.
So much for my bright idea.
I blew out a hard breath, my vision narrowing down into that black tunnel I knew was a bad sign. I didn’t have it in me to fight a juicer, not while I was shackled to a table in the middle of a fucking police station and spiraling back into meltdown.
He gripped the edge of the table so hard, I swear to fuck the thing groaned.
As if on cue, the room’s single door thumped once, and the knob rattled. Officer Fagan’s head cocked, his blazing blue eyes slanting abruptly to the side as if weighing his odds.
At least he still had the brains of a low-rent cop.
“Aw,” I murmured, a farce of a drawl in my wheeze. “So much for playing grabass in the hotbox, Fagging.”
One day, I’ll learn how to shut up.
His fist came up, a narrow distance but with enough weight to rock my head back on my shoulders. Pain exploded behind my no
se, gouged into my brain. The chair scooted back, tilted on two legs while stars whirled through my skull, only to yank back into sharp alignment as the shackles around my wrists snapped taut. All four legs slammed back to the floor. I blinked rapidly through streaming eyes.
“That’s enough, Carl!”
The voice snapped through the narrow room, jerking Officer Fagan’s shoulders into rigid opposition. I almost laughed, but my throat was full of blood and I couldn’t force the air through my swollen, leaking nose.
“I’ll handle this,” my unwitting savior said, his tone hard as the table I was bleeding on. “You go relieve Docking.”
In my watery vision, I watched Fagan roll his wide shoulders. His eyelid had stopped flickering, at least. “It was an accident,” he began, only to stumble into an awkward silence as the man with shaggy blonde hair and a hobo’s grasp of shaving habits raised a hand.
“Just go,” he suggested. It wasn’t kind, but I didn’t see any verbal bloodletting, either.
Then again, I was seeing two of each of them at the moment. I shook my head slowly, working my jaw, checking for dislocation or worse. The coppery tang in my mouth and throat was bad enough.
The door clicked close, and Detective Gregory Keith took an audible, too-long breath.
Smegging cockhole. This was not my hour. Not my day.
Not my life.
“Hey,” I said thickly, my head tilted up to keep the worst of the drainage from my shirt. It wasn’t helping. “Don’t sigh like this is my fault.”
“Riko, I swear to God.” I grinned, which made him – hardboiled detective that he was – cringe at the blood covering my teeth. “Didn’t I tell you to keep your nose out of trouble?”
He had. I guess he’d meant it literally.
Greg and I had hooked up once, about seven months ago. He’d been fresh on a promotion and looking to celebrate, I’d been high on a successful run and full of my own ego. He was nice enough, a religious man who believed in the Judeo-Christian God and who’d managed to grow up with an optimistic view of the world. I had expected the job to wear both thin.
There were lines at his green eyes that hadn’t been as deep seven months ago.
I didn’t like being in a position to know that. Ideally, we’d never have crossed paths again. What was going on in my life? Did somebody wake up and decide to just ruin my shit today?
He popped a trigger from a unit hanging from his belt, and the magnetic grip around my wrists eased. I shook off the manacles with one hand, peeled the other off my nonfunctioning arm.
“You want to tell me what happened?” he asked, pulling a worn bandana from his back pocket. “Use this, tilt your head forward, not back. Jesus, why aren’t your nanos pitching in?”
“I’m running a little dry.” Of nanos, patience, juice. He could take his pick. I jammed the cloth against my streaming nose with my good hand, wincing as the cartilage shot another fistful of pain up my sinuses. “You swear a lot, detective. Come with the promotion?” For Greg, using his Lord’s name in vain was as bad as the filthiest epithets I could think of. And I could think of some nasty ones.
It was fun to say it while he was balls deep in me, just to watch his face flush and his eyes light up, but that was about it.
Yeah. Religion wasn’t my thing, either. It probably tied into the whole authority issue. I didn’t like when fleshbags told me what to do, much less some figment of a fleshbag’s authoritarian wet dream.
“Eh.” The grunt wasn’t an answer, but it seemed the only one I’d get. He surveyed me, concern and frustration shaping his features. “What the hell happened here?”
Good question. Where did I start?
Oh, how about fuck off and on to you fucking fuckhead.
Nope. Wasn’t processing too well.
I glowered at him.
Despite his profession, Greg wasn’t otherwise unattractive. His features were narrow and his current rough ’do made him look like a beach bum masquerading as a cop. His denim jeans were worn, the green button-down left open to his collar bones, which also revealed a skinsuit underneath. Just in case. The stuff was durable, which is why I’d taken the one I was bleeding on now. His badge hung around his neck on a chain, but unlike Fagan’s, it showed some wear.
I’d never considered anything more than a fling with the guy, and fortunately Greg had known better than to pursue. I don’t think I was his type, anyway. He needed a sweet girl with stars in her eyes, the perfect cop wife who’d wait at home with the kids while Daddy was out nabbing bad guys.
I was the bad guy. And bad guys don’t talk to cops. I mean, between fucking them for laughs.
He grimaced. “Why did he hit you?”
I had to clear my throat before I opened my mouth. “An accident.” A total lie, the same one Fagan had delivered, but that was the point. I wouldn’t be made into a victim, and I sure as hell wouldn’t leave a complaint. It’s not like I had any legal recourse here. I didn’t exist. And if I did, my ass would be put in detention. Fast.
Besides, I was SINless. Off the grid meant off the grid, not filing charges. What was I, some kind of pussy?
His eyes narrowed. He was sharper, too. Yeah, definitely lost some of that shine in the intervening months. “Why are you even here?” he asked, leaning against the table. I would have answered, probably another lie, but I wasn’t thinking very well, and he lifted the same authoritative hand he’d given to Fagan when he realized it. “Never mind. You won’t tell me anyway.”
“Yeah.” I got to my feet, wincing with the effort when my dead arm swung uselessly at my side.
His gaze pinned on the torn hem of the skinsuit and the hunk of dark gray diamond steel hanging from it. The lines around his mouth deepened.
He’d lost some stardust. I’d lost an arm. Same thing. I presented my back. “Do me a solid?”
“Uh... Yeah.” He circled around the crooked table, his nostrils flaring like a spooked horse. “That’s, uh. That’s new.”
“You aren’t kidding.”
He worked the bolt gingerly. I glanced over my shoulder, impatience riding me as deep as the tunnel of exhaustion waiting to suck me in.
Whatever I meant to say, it didn’t matter. His mouth was thinned to nearly nothing, his elbows splayed like he’d grown wings. He only touched the bolt with the tips of his fingers. Just enough to get it off me.
I almost snorted out the fragile beginnings of the blood clot. Greg had seen me naked, spent more than a few hours mapping out my body. He may have even thought fondly of me, when he bothered to think of me at all.
Detective Keith, on the other hand, didn’t trust integrated tech.
No, that wasn’t quite right.
He despised it.
He looked up, meeting my gaze over the ruined blue bandana he’d given me. “Let me guess,” I said mildly. “Purist?”
The smile he gave me was wan. It was answer enough.
Purists don’t believe in tech. If they could scrape out the nanos, they would, but the city’s pollutant level is so bad, everyone needs them to survive. Besides, I’d never met a purist pure enough to mind the help the nanos give – minor regenerative capabilities, disease control. The right programming could ease fertility, reducing the harsh conditions that often lead to difficult or defective conception.
It’s a hard world, and purists are only a very small part of the hypocritical lot. Most happen to coincide with the fundamentalist religious or political sects, though. Surprise.
I’d known he was religious. Hadn’t known about the purism. Until a corporate strike gone bad had cost me my arm, I’d never sported anything more overt than vid ink, so not like I had the chance to learn.
As soon as the bolt came off, a jolt of something uncomfortable rippled down my left arm. If metal could have pins and needles, this did. I shrugged hard. The reinforced muscles comprising the shoulder girdle contracted sharply, but I didn’t bother trying to use it until the system ran through its check. It’d have to reboot.
At least the numbers in my lateral display were finally displaying more than zeroes.
“Great.” I sighed, refraining from rubbing at my aching muscles. If I did, I had no doubt Greg would comment. It’d been a rough day, and it wasn’t over. I needed to get the hell out before he got up in my junk. I didn’t think I had the patience. Or the mental functions.
No weakness allowed.
Wariness, not carefully hidden enough disgust, touched his pretty green eyes when he looked at me. At my arm. It pissed me off almost as bad as everything else on my plate, and I had a full smegging plate.
Maybe he noticed. His expression went blank. “Can you walk?”
Barely. I forced my spine straight. “I’ll be fine. Just show me the back way out.”
“Riko.” His hand on my arm – my right one – only stopped me because, shit, I was tired. Too tired to wrestle with a cop. “Where are your shoes?”
As one, we both looked down at my bare, dirty feet, toes spattered with blood and blackened by I don’t even know what else. I’d have to disinfect. The nanos dismantle most diseases, but there is a lot of gross stuff out there. For all I knew, I’d tracked in mutated syphilis.
Maybe he’d catch it.
This time, I couldn’t quite keep the laugh between my teeth. It trickled out, a hysterical edge undercutting it.
Greg’s features closed down. “That’s it. You’re on your last legs. Hang on, let me–”
“Detective.” I raised my synthetic arm, relieved when it obeyed me, and very gently pushed his hand away from mine. His gaze fell again to the smooth, matte plates worked to mimic the shape of a human hand. It wasn’t really grotesque, but it was obviously not flesh.
I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he fought revulsion.
Yeah. Douchedick. “If you want to help, just call me a cab.”
“If you wait, I can take you–”
“A cab,” I snapped, and shoved the tangled mess of my hair from my face. “And make sure your genetic meatsuit over there destroys this report.”
Greg fished a three-inch flexible screen from his back pocket. He studied it carefully as he punched in the order for my cab, giving him time to pull his shit together. “Yeah.” He hummed it. “No.”
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