Seriously, my brain wasn’t working. It took me a full two seconds to process a two-letter word. “Wait.” I frowned at him. “Seriously?”
The fan clicked overhead as the detective finished his order. Almost sixty seconds of nerve-rattling silence as I stared at his face, rapidly sifting through my options. What the shit was he doing?
But when he looked up, his eyes glinted – amusement, maybe. A bit of smug triumph. “I think I’ll keep it.” He tipped his head to the door. “Come on, I’ll walk you out the back.”
He left before I could manage to form up any protest, but waited outside to navigate me away from the main halls and into side corridors less populated. “Be serious,” I told his back.
“I am.” He stopped by a vending machine, slapped his badge against the sensor and dialed up a protein boost. “Here, for the ride.” He pushed it into my meat hand. “Not as much juice as a recharge, but it should get you to wherever you call home.”
Gratitude didn’t mix well with severe amounts of what the fuck. “What are you doing, Greg?”
“Taking care of you,” he replied flatly. But his mouth hiked up in the same smug line. “And maybe holding onto a bit of leverage.”
“What leverage?” I scoffed. I dug a nail under the seal of the drink, but didn’t pop it yet. My bare feet left black smudges in our wake – I hoped they’d make him clean it with his face. Assmunch. “You’ve got nothing.”
“Then why do you care?”
Because he didn’t actually have nothing and we both knew it. I gritted my teeth.
The report wouldn’t just be Fagan’s. It’d be a mix of this station’s and the street meat that picked me up. It’d have a surface scan of my tech, thanks to the laws that allowed cops to carry the sensors corps outlawed across the city. It had more data on me – including my goddamn DNA – than any other piece of information I’d let fall into civic hands in recent memory.
DNA that was still in at least one database, if not two.
The assclown was hoping to blackmail me.
He opened the last door in the hall, and the sun streamed through in blinding fury. A wave of heat nearly knocked me off my feet. I staggered, shoulder colliding with the frame, but Greg didn’t try to help – that meant he’d have to grab my synthetic arm. Not going to happen.
I paused, catching my breath and what was left of my energy. “What’s it going to take to get that file from you?”
He squinted into the daylight. The sun caught in his eyes, turned them to cheaphack jade. “Don’t know yet.”
“Seriously?” I gripped the doorframe, hauled my ass fully upright and leveled the kind of look on him most wouldn’t walk away from. “Don’t fuck with me, Greg.”
To his credit, he flinched, but he didn’t run. Instead, he reached out, snagged the drink from me, and cracked the seal. “You look like hell,” he replied. He passed it back, patting my flesh hand with sanctimonious care. “Talk to you soon, Riko.”
There weren’t enough curse words in the world. Not that I had the energy to spit them at him. Even the damn drink felt too heavy.
“Eat a dick, Greg,” was what I managed, and hauled my ass out of the cop shop before something else went wrong.
He didn’t try to wish me well. Probably best. I’d gone seven months without seeing him; I’d barely even thought of him. I took lovers the way I replicated clothing – I went for the mood, the fit, the color, the aesthetics. Whatever pleased me at the time.
Greg hadn’t been any different.
But now things had changed. Of all the stations in the city, I got my stupid ass dragged into that one? And thanks to that, now he had info on me that I needed back – and destroyed.
For what?
A favor, probably. Or maybe he’d use it to try and get in my pants again, though that seemed pretty unlikely what with the purism and all. That helo had long since flown.
Favors. I hated owing a cop. They don’t get cred the way runners get it. They understand the concept – everyone in the city runs on credits. People carry their data in their SIN and link it up to various modes of payment processing, each protected by six kinds of corporate sec encryption. But mercs run on more than just credits. We run on cred – reputation, the way people talk about us, how tough we are, how much backing.
Good cred earns good jobs, which earns good credits. Bad cred is like being the shitboy in a scatplay whorehouse.
And I’d been the stupid one who’d gotten herself rolled into coplandia. That’d be hell on both cred and credits, unless I fixed everything about the past twenty-four hours.
Where the hell to start?
So maybe I had some energy left after all. “Fucking fuck fuckity fucking fuck,” I hissed as I slung myself into the back of a one-seater cab waiting by the curb.
“I’m sorry,” replied a polite mechanized voice. “That is not an accepted destination. Please verbalize or input your destination.”
“Fuck you, too,” I growled, but punched in an address that wasn’t mine.
The ride took ten minutes in heavy traffic. I downed the drink on the way.
It would have taken less time to walk, but I was only riding the thing out of sight of the station. If I’d had my usual gear, I could have overridden the computer, faked out the meter, and ridden the whole thing home, but oh, no. Some jerkoff had disconnected my netware, made sure I couldn’t hack into anything.
Greg had pre-fed the meter a credit account, so when he looked, he’d know I stiffed his offer. That was okay, too. I was so damned exhausted, I wasn’t sure how I’d make it to my borrowed squat, but I’d freeze in Greg’s Judeo-Christian hell before I led the police – or a certain smeghead detective – right to my front door.
I had no doubt I’d hear from him sooner or later anyway. Just add one more problem to a growing list of them.
When I staggered out of the cab, the stagnant heat did its damnedest to flatten me into a melted puddle on the pavement. That mechanized voice wished me a very nice day. I flipped it off as I took a step toward the sidewalk. In reply, it bombarded the space in front of my eyes with a barrage of blurred ads, including one reminding me to dial in for my next cab service.
I almost kissed the curb.
Augmented reality. The adspace exists in the bandwidth, which means anyone keyed in – love the SIN, love the security – doesn’t get to strain out the noise. Most of these poor chums get used to walking around in a riot of color, motion, sound. Almost all of them have some array of apps to make it fucking bearable.
My chipset was tailored with a filter that did its best to keep up with the rotating bandwidth frequencies, but the junk was second-gen at best and needed at least one advertisement assault per district before it could key in. Given the mess I waded through now, I bet the assclowns in that lab I’d left behind had turned that off, too.
Scraping together every ounce of energy I had left, I tuned out the noise, ignored the ads around me, and began the long slog home.
Hot and tired as I was, those of us who survive in this city are the lucky ones. Although baked to a crusted scab already, anything outside the radiation shields has it a hell of a lot worse. That’s what happens when the ozone burns off and the sun turns into a singleminded death ray intent on absolute conflagration.
Or, anyway, a slow, agonizing decline into melanoma-infested attrition.
Nanos can take care of the cancer agents, but only to a point. The sun and all the atmospheric gases killed off what couldn’t take the heat, and so most of humanity gathered under shields like this one. There aren’t many. Much of the continental midwest had gone down in a methane slag, bumping our climate future from fucked real soon to apocafucked right fucking now. Over time, the big cities on what was left of the coasts had merged into giant, verminous hives of people. Like locusts, only we didn’t leave once we’d eaten everything in sight. We built on top of the bones and stuck around for shits and giggles.
More shit than giggle.
What th
e heat didn’t suck out of me, this city would. The air reeked of oil-slicked pavement, burning fuel, garbage, and a vile blend of perfume, piss, and sweat. I wasn’t standing in corporate territory, so there were no air scrubbers, no chemical washes to counteract the stench. The buildings towering on either side of the bumper-to-bumper street lacked polish, gloss or even a semblance of class.
Some districts are nothing more than tenements stacked like crooked dominoes, the roots sinking deep into the depths of a metropolis so big, even I didn’t know all of it. Some of these neighborhoods are practically a city in themselves, with their own gangs and politics. There were heights I’d never been to and depths so dangerous you’d need a full squad and a shit ton of munitions just to cross them without casualties.
By night, this district would turn into a kaleidoscope of neon, flashing screens, ad space and bait – jail bait, hooker bait, junkie bait, murder bait. The streets never empty. The daylight scavengers tag out with the nocturnal life and it’s business as usual. Everything gets harder at night. Louder.
Friendlier, in a way that only those of us who live it understand, and rough as an ass-fuck with a rusted pipe. An acquired taste.
But that’s city life. That’s what happens when humans live on top of each other like rats on the bones of a stripped carcass. Everywhere I looked, people existed. Barely cognizant of anything more than whatever pathetic desire fueled their ambulatory shuffle, barely aware of the cesspit they forged through. Like a fucked-up clock with some seriously jacked-up gears, this city and its sinners ticked along. Waiting to live.
Waiting to die.
You get used to it.
I walked by early shift hookers working their wares in electric nylon, and a couple of haggling suits already sporting wood for a little relief they didn’t have to use points on. I’d heard somewhere that you could always spot lawyers by the drugs in their pockets – ruined their sightlines. That little bit of wisdom had never steered me wrong; and always the hell away from lawyers. Scummy little bloodsuckers, even the quiet ones.
I passed a group of local toughs sprawled out front of a café that promised cold drinks, guaranteeing no toxic water or money back to surviving clientele. They’d stripped off most of their usual I’m so badass vinyl in deference to the heat, sporting enhanced muscles, chrome accessories that did jack-all but look cool, and throwback pompadours they thought made them seem dangerous. Chromers and their type can be found anywhere. They seem to attract each other, like douchewagons to a mirror. They’re harmless, usually. Posers, usually too busy admiring themselves in their vid apps.
I walked by more hobos than I knew profanities for. I hate career hobos. I knew for a fact at least forty-five percent of the beggars on this street lived better than I did.
Something about my demeanor must have warned them off from their usual hard sells. Probably the dried blood smeared all over my face. I was sporting two enormous black eyes over my swollen nose. Pretty rough shape.
I trudged over baking sidewalk that finally managed to thaw the ice in my bones, keeping my head down and my eyes open. Seeing through the augmented ads took practice, but like most of the signal to noise coming through the bandwidth, I’d learned to filter.
As I plodded through the sticky heat, I came up with a plan.
It wasn’t a very calculated plan. It started with sleep, as much as I could handle. Then I’d try and get in touch with my team. I knew there were answers out there – this kind of shit didn’t happen in a vacuum. Whether I had help or not, I’d start kicking down doors, looking for the answers someone out there had to have. I wasn’t crazy. I hadn’t gone off the deep end, and just because my nanos were committing suicide one by miniscule one, didn’t mean I’d fried my brain.
I didn’t hallucinate anything. I’d woken up in hell and watched my girlfriend go necro. I didn’t know if I’d abandoned anyone else below, and the amount of information I didn’t have was going to make explaining fucking impossible.
Would Indigo believe me?
Hell, I wouldn’t. But I’m kind of a suspicious bitch.
As the sun beat down on my head and shoulders, warming my tech arm, I struggled to hold on to the details I’d seen in that lab. The whole thing felt like a nightmare, like something that happened in a dream after a bad night’s colordust snorted off a hired asscrack.
As I walked, forcing one foot in front of the other, I made myself go over the things I’d learned. The things I’d seen. The digital file, the security forces, the variety of darkened rooms.
The sound of bullets pattering the shatterproof glass.
I forced myself to go over Nanji’s last words, over and over until the echo of my seething rage overwhelmed the clamor of the pedestrian rats sweating all around me; incessant drones eager to get nowhere.
Honestly speaking, there were any number of ways I’d fucked this mess up, and my own systems were on that list.
I flashed back to all the signs of corruption I’d learned to look for. Irrational behavior was one, but I wasn’t sure current events counted. The black tint to my eyes and blood had looked pretty bad, but since I’d downed the boost, my nanos had settled enough that I figured I’d eased back from nanoshock. This was a good sign – maybe. But I should still check it out.
My arm was working okay, give or take the stuff I needed to turn on, and I didn’t exactly feel the need to squish anything for kicks. I wasn’t sure how corruption was supposed to feel, but Lucky said it worked like a virus. A technological fever. I figured I’d know.
Small victory, but fuck it, I needed one. It gave me the leeway I needed to put off seeing my mentor. Explaining what I didn’t have a handle on felt like an overwhelming task.
It took me forty-five minutes to drag my sorry ass all the way home. The place was a towering shack, squeezed in with a block of them, stacked like crates threatening to crack. It had been fenced in by the ramshackle offerings of tenement hoarders determined to protect what was theirs by any means necessary. Rusted iron, fragments of car frames jacked from who knows where, old bed frames, rotten couches. Probably the remains of trespassers.
I let myself in through the back entry, took the stairs until I was ready to give up and roll my aching body right back down them in desperate need of oblivion. The place was dank, dingy, rocked like a scream queen group and a chilldive technician were having some kind of soundwave orgy, but it was safe.
Enough. Safe enough.
You take what you can get.
I slammed open the door, muttered the passcode that let me bypass the temporary security I’d set up – a portable voicelock capsule stuck to the wall, rigged to drop toxic shells if my voice didn’t register within four seconds of entry.
No bodies greeted my bleary survey, so I must be leaving an impression with the locals. The first two jackwagons who’d tried to break in, I’d tossed out front with the rest of the “treasures” the neighbors collected. Either they’d been nabbed by carnivorous dogs or regained enough mobility to get the hell out.
Kicking the door closed rearmed the security, and I made my way down the narrow hall, up the short set of creaking stairs, and into the single bedroom.
I didn’t even bother to disinfect myself. A million credits weren’t bribery enough to care. I collapsed face first onto my cot – liberated from said neighbors and liberally doused with sanitizer – and closed my eyes.
I’d have a lot to do when I woke up. I had to try to get a hold of the contacts in my roster I hoped would help, try to figure out the price I’d have to pay for it. Try to explain to Nanji’s brother exactly what happened. Whether he did or didn’t believe me, I’d need to find a team, steal a file from and generously pay back a certain nosy cop, get my tech system scrubbed and turned back on, put my girlfriend to rest – and for all that, it’d take a crowbar to peel me off this bed.
I’d do everything later. All I wanted, all I desperately needed, was uninterrupted sleep.
4
Like any piece of ha
rdware, the body is a functional machine. Ages ago, scientists figured out that the brain was just a kind of fleshy processor shooting out electrical impulses to the rest of the system. From there, it was only matter of time before corporations turned theory to reality and started shilling.
Software upgrades came after the obvious hardware upgrades. A cheerleader cramming for her college exams could pop some intelligence enhancers while a single dad in the ’burbs – that is, any one of a dozen neighborhoods not currently featured on the crime feeds at any given time – could score a packet of no-sleep without too much trouble.
Then hardware transitioned from necessity to a competition. Need an edge? No problem, replace your hands, your legs, your heart. Medical innovation gave way to military, and from military to aesthetic.
It seemed an obvious step, moving from video calling to data jacking, and from data jacking to projected uploading. The signal wavered and the noise got louder, and that’s the way the soulless consumerist spunkchuckers of the world like it.
And, hey, if the price to pay is an occasional, quietly eradicated rash of corruption among the middle-class sheep, well, the cost of doing business and all.
But projected uploading is also why I could take a call in a state of deep sleep, converse with someone else and remember it clearly. Even better, I didn’t have to miss some seriously needed rest.
Although my meatspace body remained flattened out in my tiny cot, my brain responded to the haptic tap at the base of my skull. I was too damn tired to respond consciously, so the call protocols kicked in and I found my projected body in a white projected room. A plain table waited in the middle of it, the usual centerpiece of a baseline projection interface, and so did an endearingly boyish detective seated at it.
Less usual. Less expected.
Less welcome.
The place was stark. It looked more like a cleaned-up, colorless version of the police station interrogation room than a place to have a casual conversation, but that’s the augmented reality business for you. You can pay to make your cyberspace a little more ritzy, include all kinds of little apps, but why bother? In about three seconds, all that empty space is flooded with ads.
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