Unless you pay for that, too.
The bright-eyed man at the table, with his hair cut and his three-day beard shaved, leaned forward in anticipation. “Riko, I’m glad–”
I held up my hand. “Wait a sec.”
Greg’s voice died off.
We didn’t have to wait long. With two confirmed connections, color vomited across the server. Hot pink and green, red and blue, purples, oranges, screaming text and neon vids. Jarring on the best of days, and downright vertigo-inducing on a day like mine.
Wincing, I crossed the small space and slid into a seat. Like its matching table, it was plain. Cold, simple metal with no distinguishing features. The kind of thing easily projected. “I’m not going to ask how you got my freq.” They’d scanned it off my chipset when I was at the station. I’d need to scrub the markers and reprogram my frequency sooner rather than later. “Talk fast. I am not in the mood for shit.”
He had the grace to look sheepish, which his fresh-out-of-school persona telegraphed exceedingly well. The creases by his eyes, the lines I’d seen carved into his mouth at the station, were gone. His hair was a little bit brighter – not much, just enough – and his jaw a smidge harder.
The vain bastard. He’d cosmetically enhanced his uplink appeal.
“Sorry to bother you, but I couldn’t let it go.” His smile, when he turned it on me, carried the programming equivalent of boyish charm. As if an aw, shucks, ma’am, t’weren’t nothin’ could be distilled into visual magnetism.
My lips quirked. Not a smile.
Unlike him, I didn’t enhance my persona. The only thing I made sure of was that I was dressed and clean – because let’s face it, nobody likes meeting people with blood, sweat, or the haze of burned-off slank smeared all over them. I kept my persona up to date, which meant my bleached hair was long at the top and hanging down the left side of my face, shorn to a buzz at the sides. My roots came in dark brown, courtesy of the genetic fuckup my mother hadn’t paid for. At least my eyes had come out hers – a dark hazel that went moss green or swampy brown depending on the light. Even my tattoos made it onto the projected copy.
And so did my synthetic arm. Which Greg was very studiously avoiding.
I leaned against the table, folding my arms on top of it, flesh over diamond steel. It pushed the shiny red tanktop my persona wore against my breasts, and that good old Greg noticed. I couldn’t claim much by way of stacking, too much muscle to be top-heavy, but it hadn’t stopped me yet. “Let me guess.” I dropped my naturally contralto tones an octave or two. Practically a purr. “Courtesy call?”
Damn, but his face lit up. You’d think I’d offered him a handjob under the table.
“Something like that.” He grinned, unabashedly flirtatious in a way that was part refreshing, and mostly funny.
Cops and SINless don’t mingle. I wasn’t the only saint to flirt with that line, but I’d never pictured good old Greg buying in. I wondered if he was having some work troubles, or maybe he wanted to flex some muscle without all the regs tying him down. It was obvious that I was something new and interesting, and the file he held over my head made him feel like he had more leverage than he’d ever get again.
Given our history, brief as it was, I had a sneaking suspicion that my new arm turned me into forbidden territory. A way to stick it to the Purist Man.
Maybe he wanted me to call on his God while he stuck it to me again.
Too bad. Once was fun, twice was a rental.
“Cute, but no.” I shook my head, leaning back in my chair – away from him so obviously that he’d have to be stupid to miss the memo. “You’re having a rough year, right? Miles of red tape, clocked in and out like a civic official but given none of the perks. Overtime at half the going rate?”
A faint wince around the eyes. “Salary, mostly.”
Poor bastard. “Too good to take a kickback?”
His mouth tightened.
I bit back a sigh. Wasn’t my fault he had principles. “So you want something from me. That’s why you kept my file.” I crossed my legs under the table. “Leverage, I get. But you better play these next few seconds smart, ’cause you won’t get a second chance at this.”
He frowned.
When he didn’t immediately answer, I perched my chin in the palm of my metal hand and waited him out.
Did I glitch him? It was always a risk. The bandwidth held steady enough for short calls, but got crazy twitchy around high time. When the system clocked the average consciousness of over twenty-six billion users at any given moment, the bandwidth – already straining under the payload of thousands of feeds, hundreds of thousands of terabytes of data – suffered.
And that’s just in this city alone.
Most sinners get a basic package for their upload needs, and it comes with shit stabilizers. You learn to ration this app for that, tweak that signal for this drag, but like everything else, those who pay more – to broadcast and to receive – get better signal.
I wasn’t a paying customer, and Greg couldn’t afford it. Not on a cop’s credline. We coped. Or, like me, we cheated. Well, would have cheated if all my shit was working and I felt like risking enhancing the feed for this.
It wasn’t, and I didn’t. I was too tired for this. Too wired.
Finally, he breathed out a long sigh. It twitched twice and his avatar flickered, but the connection held. “Okay, fine, I knew you’d crash out. You were in pretty rough shape. I thought the best thing to do was wait a few hours and then initiate a call.”
Because I’d be guaranteed to pick it up, assuming I survived the nano burnout. I pulled a face. “I don’t have time to fuck around with you.”
“You’re sleeping,” he pointed out.
Yeah, like I needed the reminder. He was right, of course. If I wasn’t here, I’d still be sound asleep. No loss of time.
Just of patience.
My girlfriend had gone necro right in front of me, and I was stuck playing footsie with a cop. Again.
He winced when I didn’t so much as blink at him. “I wanted to say sorry.” He rubbed the back of his neck with a hand that wasn’t as callused as the ones he’d used to open my protein boost.
Vain, vain, vain.
“And to tell you that Fagan’s been assigned to desk duty, pending investigation.” His mouth pursed, eyebrows drawing together. “I pulled his report, so you don’t need to worry.”
“You keeping it safe personally?”
“Yeah.” His tone would have made me laugh, all confused cop and eager to please, but I didn’t have it in me. Moron. He should have left it on the system.
Bone-deep tired scrapped for space beside resentment. “Apology accepted,” I replied, slapping both hands on the table and standing.
He raised his hand. “Riko, wait, I–”
“No.”
He looked taken aback. “You don’t want to hear what I have to say?”
“Sue me.” I ran my hand through my hair, but it wasn’t quite the same as if I would have done it in the real world. It felt different; smoother, finer. I knew it was hair beneath my fingers, managed to tuck it behind my ear so it wouldn’t fall over an eye, but it wasn’t quite right.
A body paid for perfection. Corporation credo. If I wanted better sensory data, I could fork over the creds. Not worth.
“But I–”
Ugh. “You’re a government official, detective.” I stressed the title. He scowled. “I’m a saint. I’m not interested in whatever you’ve got. Either throw me something you need, one-and-done, or dick out.”
Since he didn’t bat an eyelash at the street euphemism for SINless, I assumed he’d already heard it. Would have been surprised if not. A good detective kept his ear open. “I’m not asking you to marry me,” he said, his jaw tightening.
That didn’t even warrant a response. Very carefully, I scooted the chair under the table. You don’t want to break things in a projected room. The maintenance systems get real spiky about it. “Leave a messa
ge at the Mecca when you need that favor.”
His perfect hands clenched on the tabletop. His gaze dropped to them, that deliberate charm cracking some. “What if I said I’d give you the file in exchange for this?”
“Is it one thing?” I asked. “Or a string of them?”
He didn’t have to answer. I read it in his face.
I would have smacked the back of his head – mostly to irritate him – but you can’t do that in a projection room. Most basic servers, which I had, aren’t designed to mimic reality. I could touch my hair and feel the strands because I knew without a doubt what my hair was. I had my whole life of knowing. I couldn’t touch Greg because I didn’t know if his hair was smooth today or laden with product, if his jacket was synthetic or real. If it was cold or warm, rough or soft. I didn’t know what he thought of his jacket, or how he felt his own hair. Without smoother integration, I could overload the system and fry my communication receptors. Or his.
While the possibility of shorting him had some merit, the damage it’d do to my chipset could blow the whole thing. Not worth a little peace and quiet.
“I could help you,” he insisted. “Listen, all I’m asking is to be a name on your roster.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. He didn’t even know what he was offering. Putting your name on a merc’s roster is basically asking to get your shit shot up on a semi-regular basis. Sure, the cred – both the reputation and the monetary kind – might be good, but it’s a one-way street to hell.
I pinched the bridge of my nose between my flesh fingers. “I don’t have time for this, Greg.”
“Not even for–”
“If you try to bribe me with that report again, I swear to your God I’ll break your jaw in six places.” My threat cut him off with so much flat denial that he closed his mouth, eyes narrowing. “Look, that thing is important, and you know that. But you and I both know this is a one-off deal. I do something for you, you give me the data. Because if you don’t,” I added, leaning down to flatten both hands on the plain table, “you know that your cred takes a hit where you can’t afford it. And mine” – I flashed that hard little smile I knew bothered him – “goes up when I hunt your ass down for it.”
Cops hover closer to sinner than saint. That doesn’t make them immune to the concept of street cred. A badge without a certain amount of reputation finds his job boring as balls. A badge who hopes to wield his cred for kicks suddenly finds his ass the subject of everyone else’s betting pools.
Maybe that was why he came here hoping I’d take him on. Maybe he was bored. Or in over his head with something else already and hoping to use my cred as his shield.
I’d rather suck on a bullet.
“Tell me why,” he said.
I gave him half of what I figured. The irritating half. “Aside from the fact that you’re pretty much textbook blue and I don’t think you can lie for shit,” I said flatly, “I don’t need a toothless badge to babysit. I’m busy.” Also, I was busy on the kind of thing that would make a man like Greg scream like a little kid, but I didn’t want to tell him that. One, it sounded like I was protecting him. Which I sort of was, and I didn’t care to explain it. Two, he’d ask questions.
He’d have to. He was still a cop. If I so much as hinted that I’d glimpsed a necro conversion, there’d be a serious problem.
His shoulders slumped.
My cue to go. I tried to feel bad for him, I really did, but I honestly could give a bag of dicks. I was racked out cold back in my squat, sleeping what I figured was the sleep of the dead, but even occupying myself with this projected call didn’t erase every detail of Nanji’s face. Of her corruption.
I should have... done something. Anything.
Not that I could. The only thing that kept me from corrupting on the heels of nanoshock was the recharge the cops had shoved in me.
She’d gotten bullets.
Greg felt laughably surreal, a weird cherry on a diarrhea day. I didn’t know what he’d hoped to accomplish here. A shaky offer of contract work seemed like an unstable plan, even for the lure of that file – which he’d basically just taken the teeth out of by keeping it off the system. If he was personally hanging onto it, that meant a good linker could relieve him of it for less than the cost of a police system incursion.
But I was saving his ass. From me, as well as anything else being on my roster would set him up for. “When you need a favor – one,” I added firmly, lifting one finger, “you leave a message with Shiva at the Mecca. I’ll get it done. You give me the file and erase all copies and we’re square. That’s how this works.”
“You are stone cold.”
“Don’t ever forget that,” I shot back. The look I leveled at him wasn’t sympathetic this time. “Don’t fuck around anymore.”
I headed for my exit without waiting for a reply. It was easy to spot, the only patch of white in a wall that looked like a collective of graffiti artists threw up on it. Pasha’s Den of the Exotic – exactly the cheap contract sex service it sounded like – fought for territory with the Rat Café and every possible rendition of corporate propaganda you could ever want.
They used to put ads on the disconnection doors, but too many complaints of confused users getting stuck in projection earned them a lawsuit they couldn’t buy off. Although most of us don’t need to use the door to activate our protocols, a lot of older gen users prefer the comfort.
As for me, I just liked leaving on a, well, bang.
My hand was on the panel when Greg’s voice cut the silence. “I have a kid, Riko.”
I hesitated. I shouldn’t have.
“She’s three years old.”
Fuck.
I turned. A three year-old kid confessed to a recent fling? Smooth. “Married?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
Surprise, surprise. Guess he’d had that sweet little wife all along. Only instead of waiting at home while her cop husband nabbed the bad guys, she waited while he fucked them. Heh.
“So?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.
Greg ran both hands through his hair, finally meeting my eyes from across the neon-spattered floor. “She wants a divorce.”
How was this my problem?
I really couldn’t handle complicated people. “That sucks.”
He frowned at me. Obviously, that wasn’t the response he’d wanted.
I snorted a laugh that caused him to draw back as if he’d been slapped. “What do you want me to say? Is it supposed to make me feel guilty that I was complicit in your extramarital affairs? It doesn’t.” Not even a little bit. Greg was an adult, he could handle his own decisions, and I’d handle mine. “You’ll be fine,” I assured him. “You’re a cop. You probably know a good lawyer.”
Something hard and desperate banked in his green eyes, something that could have been anger, but looked more like envy to my tired brain. It twisted his upgraded mask into something ugly, undoing all that cred he put into the work. “I need better income.”
“So?” I asked again.
“So I can’t get a second job, Riko. A cop doesn’t get to put his badge away for another shift.”
Ah. Now it made sense. It wasn’t about me; it was about the income contracting out to a merc could give him. I was probably the only runner he was on good terms with. Damn it. “No,” I said again. “Hell, no.”
“I love her, you know.”
Maybe. Maybe his grasp on that subject sucked, too. “I’m glad,” I said evenly. “What’s her name?”
“Sandra.”
I didn’t notice anything different on his face. Hearts didn’t sprout up around his head, hosannas didn’t play behind his voice. No sparkles. Nothing that could tell me if he loved this woman or was spinning me some kind of song.
Honestly, I didn’t care. “Then patch it up with Sandra,” I told him. “Work out your financial issues together and leave me out of it.”
“You’re the only one I’ve ever cheated on her with, Riko. Doesn’t that mean something
?”
My fingers cracked against the panel.
“Yes,” I answered, very slowly. As if I was talking to a child. “It means that you’re a purist and an asshole.” Not always mutually inclusive. “And that I liked you better before. Actually, scratch that.” I gave up on the door entirely. “I liked you better when we weren’t talking. Chunk off, Detective Keith.”
“Riko, wait–”
Triple hell no, with a dash of eat a dick for flavor. I gave up the drama of the door and dropped the projection.
I slept for almost thirteen hours, and I was still nursing a grudge when I woke up.
Groggy as hell, I forced my eyes open around a seam of scum and grit. As soon as light touched my optics, the numbers in my arm’s informational display faded into view. Green, simple, brutalized into the minimalist programming I preferred. Back to normal.
Groaning, I rolled over and shrugged my left shoulder, testing gingerly for hurt. Fortunately for me, today my meatsack brain didn’t feel like being a dick. Awesome. I wasn’t in the mood.
Normally, I’d check the shit that mattered. Palm up my readout – which was tied in with my disconnected netware, so fuck them, very much – and check messages. I couldn’t engage that display until I had Lucky recalibrate my chipset and turn my netware back on. All I had going for me was the structural data coming from my arm’s feed and basic chipset functions.
Not helpful, unless I was desperate to know exactly what my rescued mattress was made of.
I’d catch up on whatever I’d missed the past few days later. Right now, I had a mission. One that didn’t involve worrying about the time or the weather. I could guess both: time for a drink, and hot as hell.
I rolled off the cot, feeling a thousand times better and still about thirty percent into fucked. Dragging myself to the small shower, I shed my filthy clothes and dropped them a pile. I’d shred them later.
I wasn’t disorganized by nature, but I wasn’t a neat freak, either. I just didn’t own all that much stuff. Especially now that my everyday arsenal had gone the way of the memories prior to waking up in that hellhole.
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