by Ren Warom
Counts to a hundred.
At thirty she feels the extra weight drop into the bones and viscera. Tension is all gone. Life is gone. But she holds on, counting, more for herself than anything else. When her stomach’s settled, and it will, she’ll take out her knife and do what needs doing.
Her IM opens.
You’re blocking me now?
Fuck! I’m working, Deuce. Why does her life keep doing this?
I’m sorry, but this is important.
This is hella awkward is what it is.
The dead woman is a dead weight, haha. Her arms are already aching. Whatever. She should hurt. She should feel something.
Amiga.
She leans against the wall, giving in. What the hell. It’s not like she’s got anything she’d rather do and this alley is not a short cut, it’s a filthy, stagnant dumping ground. No one will accidentally stray down here to catch her holding a corpse. She has time.
Fine. Talk.
Thank you. I think you know why we need you on this job.
Yup.
I think you also know we wouldn’t ask unless it was important.
She sighs. I do.
It’s for Da Fellows.
Slip activist numero uno? I thought he’d gone signal dark?
So did we.
So now she’s intrigued. The Hornets know all kinds of stuff they don’t tell her. For safety—theirs, not hers. As if she’d ever dream of breathing a word about them to Twist.
He’s been involved in some deep shit and he needs our help.
Hornets specifically?
Yeah.
Because of me?
Mostly. Also because we’re damn good and he can trust us.
Right. So what does he need from me? Or rather, what does he need from my boss?
We have to catch a drone and re-program it. You can help with that.
Um… Why is he stalling? That’s not like Deuce at all. He’s a straight-talker, not a dissembler. What does Fellows need me to do, Deuce?
Deuce makes this sound like a throat clearing.
He needs you to break into Twist’s vault and retrieve a data packet.
She bursts out laughing.
What?
The laughter carries on until it suddenly clicks that she’s for real standing here, leaning on the wall, busting a gut, with a dead body drooping in her arms. Disrespectful much. That sobers her up good and quick, which puts the right emphasis on the only logical response.
No. Categorical. You can absolutely fuck off, Deuce. Fellows can fuck off. Twist caught me doing something like that I’d end up in the vault myself, in the display tanks.
I get that it’s a lot to ask, but…
No, you really don’t, she interrupts because, wow, he hasn’t a clue what he’s asking because if he did, she cannot believe he would. I won’t do it. Do not ask me again. Now I have work to do, so do me the courtesy of leaving me the hell alone.
There’s a hurt silence, she knows he’s hurt because she knows Deuce. She hates that she knows him so well, that implies investment, and admitting how she was once invested in ‘Amiga and Deuce’ as a thing aches like cold in the bones high on the mono. He doesn’t bother to reply, he’s just gone, which also lets her know he’s deeply disappointed in her too.
She’s surprised to find how much that upsets her, but the weight in her arms gives her a convenient patsy for unwanted emotions. Of course she’s upset. Why wouldn’t she be? Amiga hefts the dead woman, wondering if she can still do what she needs to. She was ready, but now she’s edgy, emotional, she’ll make a damn mess of everything. Surely she could just leave this poor bitch here instead of carving her up?
“Twist won’t know,” she whispers to the woman, who can’t hear, of course she can’t. “Will he?”
She’s never been brave enough to test the theory of Twist’s power to see through her. Maybe she could, sure, some day, but today is not that day. Today she has no energy for any more, and testing Twist’s patience is way beyond more. It’s too much. So she’s going to get this over and done with instead, like a good little Cleaner. Then she’s going to go the hell home, cry a lot, get drunk on that shitty beer slowly going lukewarm in her dodgy fridge and sleep for about a thousand hours.
And she’s definitely not going to talk to Deuce.
* * *
Fine as a rice noodle from a distance, the Mono writhes its way around the towering pinnacles of the city in what looks to the uninitiated like an incoherent tangle. Mono trains are slender and efficient. Operated by computers overseen from the Hive, the central nervous system of Slip, where the Hive Queens have absolute authority.
Amiga likes ants in general, but she hates the Queens. Theoretically they’re locked in Hive by Emblem, the key holding Hive to Slip to RL, but they’re clever and determined and every now and then they manage to find a way around Emblem into Slip. It’s never pretty. Before she saw for herself what they can do, she used to think it was some kind of cliché—the mad AIs. Now she knows better. A cliché is not so trite when it’s right there in the distance, huge enough to give you a nosebleed just looking at it, and trashing everything in its path.
Exhausted, she waits for an empty shoot and changes as it carries her up to the platform. Slipping into a streamlined, double-thickness orange jumpsuit and a pair of peacock-blue Bladers. Her work gear she stuffs into her empty backpack. She’ll have to chuck the damn thing like always. You can wash blood out in cold water but you still know it was there.
At the platform she waits under sputtering lights in the evening chill for the .351 to arrive. She’d have been on the track already given the chance, but with only minutes before this mono hits platform that’s asking to be catapulted off and thrown to the ground several hundred feet below. Not exactly how she wants to spend her evening, smearing her innards all over the pavement. She’s fucked up, not fucking suicidal.
The mono’s approaching whine fills the station, setting off a scramble for readiness that’s guaranteed full-on entertainment. Monos are sardine cans from five forty-five P.M. to eleven P.M. at night and this mass of straining idiots might as well be clamouring for mummification as the .351 comes haring into the station in a whirl of wind and leaves.
There are no trees this high up. The mono brought them all the way from Sendai, where trees are everywhere, and almost all of them real. Amiga loves how wind has a mind of its own, how it seems to pull the leaves along purely for fun. There’s a stampede for the doors, a scuffling and thumping as passengers fight for a place to sit or stand before the whine builds, accelerates, and the mono explodes out of the station in a burst of stunning speed.
Amiga’s ready.
She leaps, catches the back draft and, as her blades touch down on the track and the magnets activate, she’s crouched, her legs moving fast, keeping her within sight of the mono’s red-and-white striped backside as it practically flies to the next station. Between the faceless visages of bright ’scrapers and dull ’rises, too fast to see her reflection in the glass as anything more than a blur, she holds steady in the mono’s wake through Hangoon and Norii, neither station on the .351’s stop schedule.
Next stop is Ginzo, but Amiga’s not going that far. The track runs through Sakkura, right through the middle of several ’scrapers, disappearing with hollow pops of sound into long, dimly lit and treacherously narrow tunnels lined with the grimy windows of cramped apartments. The mono does this all over Foon Gung, where it couldn’t go around or between, it goes through; and some tunnels hide secrets. Her ’rise, Jong-phu, is one of them.
Under the rails, in the secret space between mono and building, are a series of squats cobbled together by the Hornets. Home. Reaching out, her hand encased in a thick, plastic cast with a catchlock set into the wrist, Amiga hooks onto a zip wire as she flies past, whipping off the track and spinning down into the waiting arms of a webbed sling, curling her body to minimize impact.
Unhooking herself, she grabs the bottom of the sling a
nd vaults out, heading through cramped walkways to the hovel she calls her own. On the way she yanks at the velcro fastenings of the glove, dying to get it off. It’s like welding steel around your arm, but it’s the only safe way to get off the track.
All the homes here are assembled from huge 3D-printed parts and brightly coloured, though it’s hard to see in the meagre lighting. The brainchild of a design genie called Liberty, printed homes have become ubiquitous amongst under-mono communities, transforming them from shantytowns to neat, albeit crowded plastic villages. Everything modernizes eventually.
Amiga’s cabin is bright yellow. Neon in fact, to match her personality—a joke she regrets every time she sees it practically glowing in the dark. Sometimes she’s too full-on snark even for herself. She hops up on to the side ladder, scrambles to the roof and opens the hatch she never remembers to lock, throwing her backpack and then herself down into darkness. Terrific.
“Oi, on. I’m home.”
Her lights are supposed to be movement activated but her sensors are on the fritz and she hasn’t the flim for new ones just yet, nor has she quite gotten round to twisting the arm of a fellow Hornet to fix them for free.
Turning to lean on her kitchen and take her bladers off, because she might need to cry and get drunk right now but there’s no way that’s happening with these clunky-arse things still on her feet, she finally looks at her meagre half lounge, and groans before she can stop herself. Sat on her sofa, a thinly padded ugly old green thing she can’t quite believe cost as much as it did, is Deuce, his arms crossed and his least impressed face welded on.
Tall and broad for an Asian thanks to some Nordic blood on his mother’s side, he’s got his father’s poker face, with eyes like a hundred flim chips, and his mother’s blonde hair. When they were together she called him her Viking Samurai.
“So,” he says, “wanna tell me about your day?”
Stellar. She’s so not up to dealing with this shit right now.
“It was work. That’s it.”
“Uh-huh.”
He doesn’t look convinced and Amiga has this unbearable urge to rifle through her pack and chuck the jacket she was wearing earlier in his face. Blood would probably make her point, but that would be petty. Beyond petty in fact. Especially as she’s fully aware that’s not what he means.
This is part of that whole novel between them, the one she put an abrupt The End to, imagining having all this fall apart and go away would make it easier to breathe. Why it hasn’t is a mystery she’s yet to begin trying to figure out. People give up on you when you fuck up, don’t they? They give up on you when you push them away. Why hasn’t he? Why haven’t the Hornets?
“Look, I don’t want to talk shop, it only gives you an excuse to bug me about my job, and all that’s going to do is piss me off, so can I get a rain check on the heart to fucking heart?” He opens his mouth but she holds up a hand, unnerved by how hard it’s shaking. “No more about Fellows either. It’s no. That’s it.”
“Amiga. It’s important.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Deuce. Why? Why is it important that I put my life on the line for some fucking hack I don’t know?”
“Fellows needs this thing in Twist’s vault. Twist doesn’t even know it’s there. He needs us to send it to someone, and if they don’t get it… Bad shit, Amiga. Bad shit.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“Yes.”
“And you believed him?”
“Yes.”
“Idiot.”
He leans forward, holding her with those black eyes. So fucking sincere.
“You know I’m not. Fellows is legit. If he says bad things, he means bad, Amiga. He’s been signal dark. Someone of his calibre does not go SD for nothing.”
“But he won’t tell you the nature of the bad shit?”
“No.”
“Then I won’t do it.”
“Then we will.”
Amiga gapes at him, utterly aghast.
“Are you kidding me? You wouldn’t stand a fucking chance. You’d all die!”
He sits back and ugh, he’s looking at her like she’s gone and been an arsehole again.
“So you do it then. Either way it’s happening. He needs this and we’re going to get it for him.”
Amiga turns around and punches the wall, which is a dumb idea. Turns out 3D-printed walls really fucking hurt.
“Fuck’s sake. Amiga!”
Deuce leaps up and grabs her hand and holy smoke coming out of her ears that’s too much up close and personal for her to handle right now. She yanks her hand away and backs up into the kitchen, but that dumb as a stump ex of hers just keeps on following. Starts rifling over her head for any kind of first-aid kit, which he finds in seconds despite her looking for two whole hours the other week and finding sweet FA.
Slamming the kit down on the counter, his mouth set in a grim line, he sets to cleaning up the gash across her knuckles and gluing it shut. She’s pretty sure she doesn’t breathe the whole time.
“Could you, just for once, not be you?” he asks when he’s done.
She folds her arms, closing off.
“No. And you’re not doing the job.”
He folds his arms, mirroring. Bastard.
“I am.”
“No. I am.” And she only says it because he can’t, they can’t. “You,” she pokes the air viciously, “are going to make sure I come out of it alive.”
He says nothing at first, just holds her in that black gaze, suspended. Space would probably be kinder to her lungs.
“If you’re sure,” he says finally, quietly.
“I’m sure.” She’s only sure that they’re not doing it, but that’s sure enough.
Deuce nods. “Thank you.”
He heads for the table, no doubt eager to go and get the Hornets et al up to speed on her involvement. She better get free meals after this shit. Lots of them. Never mind that she already does. They all make sure she’s looked after when she lets them. Especially Deuce, who has a new fucking girlfriend and probably shouldn’t be so considerate. And there she is, all pissy again.
“Don’t thank me,” she snaps as he leaps for the hatch and starts to climb out. “I’m only doing it because I think you’d fuck it up.”
He looks down at her, his face half in shadow, but there’s that disappointment again, blazing away. The bridge smoldering behind her.
“I know.”
Down the Rabbit Hole
Stuck on a sidewalk swarming with meat suits, Shock stalks the edge for a safe place to cross a freeway locked into insanity mode. He’s about ready to commit genocide. Mothball pockets require austerity measures, cheap-ass Slip shops whose only option to jack the Slip is manual and likely to fry half his workable neurones. Unlucky for him, the cheapest Slip shops are in Hanju, his home district, a place he expends considerable energy avoiding. To top it all off, he has to run this one unmedicated. Too risky otherwise. Dandy, just freaking dandy.
He sneers into the traffic, earning a particularly rigid middle finger from some ugly-freak-looking taxi driver. Shock flips the finger back, because the bastard likely deserves it, then throws himself across the freeway, frantically dodging bumpers and praying he can dodge anyone he shares DNA with.
In Hanju proper, he’s surrounded by familiar narrow streets and dwarfed beneath calamitously high warrens of apartments. Built too close for comfort, the Hanju apartment blocks have been knocked together over the years, street by street, transforming their innards to some sort of over-populated rabbit warren. Even where they span the road, makeshift—and often residential—bridges have been constructed, joining the blocks together into one gigantic habitation maze; home leading into home with almost no privacy whatsoever.
Shock grew up cheek to jowl with neighbours as far as his eye could see. He still recalls the postmaster walking through his bedroom at six A.M. on the dot, yelling “annyeong-haseyo” to his mother in the kitchen and tossing her the morning paper and
mail. Remembers struggling to survive in neighbourhoods of corridors crawling with other Korean brats who hated the very fact of his existence. Made it their business to corner him at every opportunity and pound their disapproval into his flesh.
He went to school with those selfsame brats in a schoolhouse created from thirteen apartments knocked together on the seventeenth floor, under the iron rule of their form teacher, Eun-ji, a forty-something mother of seven who was perpetually furious with the world and the most unnatural mother he ever met bar his own.
Pulling shaking hands through messy bi-coloured hair, he aims for the strands of memory beneath, attached by sinewy strings of scar tissue too tender to sever, too raw to bear. Growing up in the warren was the nine circles of hell and then some. If he could, if the future were populated by wonders the past promised and never fulfilled, he’d wipe the whole memory of his childhood clean away.
Back then he was considered some sort of demon-child. A pariah. As if centuries of once-forgotten superstition found a new home on his shoulders. A Min-seo who wanted to be a Min-jun, refusing to wear the sprigged cotton dresses her mother, Ha-eun, sewed from fabric bought from Cheongparo blockstreet market, and wondering what the hell her body was doing growing all the wrong goddamn parts. No one else understood the parts were wrong, they thought it was the mind.
Ha-eun spent a frightening portion of the meager wages she made washing floors and sewing clothes on quacks and crooks all over Korea-town and beyond, none of them Korean, all of them liars who promised to sweat, bleed, chant or coax by whatever means the demons from Min-seo’s mind. A good deal of the memories between three and twelve are coated in the sticky stench of incense and shot through with pain sharp as the scalpels used to carve egress for bad spirits.
It’s not hate he feels for Ha-eun precisely—the drugs deal with that—more a low-grade, seething sense of abandonment. Of having had the right to expect more and never getting it. His father, Hoon, was never more than background noise, a disappointed shadow haunting the corners of their rooms. Not a talkative man, he stopped trying to communicate altogether when his daughter insisted she was his son.