by Ren Warom
“Heard from Breaker yet? Still can’t believe he was our connection all along. Incredible.” You can tell he’s a code nerd, his face has gone rapt, like he’s seeing Buddha rising to Nirvana, fingers plucking out a seriously enlightened solo on the most radical axe ever spawned from Banyan wood. She’d vomit, but again… waste of food.
“Yeah, well, he’s not exactly fast to RSV…”
A bolt of agony, sharp as a screw, hits her drive. Amiga drops the bento, too busy screaming and clutching her head to lament all that lovely lost food. Pain radiates heavily from her drive as if it’s a stone thrown hard into water, her brain meat rippling in ever-increasing circles. From far away, she feels Deuce grab her up and hold her. She half wishes he’d do that forever, and half wants him to back the fuck off. Then the noise starts; the screech of metals, the hiss of static, and everything else disappears.
Amiga’s wrenched out of her head and pulled backward through her own flash, through the tiny link of her IM connection, meant only for recorded thoughts, not part or whole of a consciousness. Cleaner through the eye of a needle. Sucked in and away, like unconsciousness, like sleep, screaming as she goes. The tunnel she’s yanked through is long, dark and too tight. It abrades at her. If her mind was skin, it’d be red raw and bleeding, transmitting a symphony of nerve pain. The journey seems to take forever and no time all at once, and she’s literally vomited out, still screaming.
Expecting to splash into the eerily real fake water of the Slip, Amiga isn’t prepared for violent impact. Her reward is the air knocked clean out of her chest and eye-watering reverberations tingling through every bone in her body. Gasping, she curls into a ball, holding tight to her limbs until the sensation fades away. This is one of those moments she truly wishes that the slipping experience was not directly connected to the nervous system for max reality-field experience. Who the hell wants reality when a dream takes on nightmarish qualities?
When it becomes bearable, she pulls herself up from the ground, taking care with her head. Looks around to see where she is.
J-Net, but not as she knows it.
What the fuck?
Amiga’s jacked into J-Net before with Deuce’s by-your-leave. It’s a slick, bright-lights/big-city deal, fast-paced and hectic. Stands as a spiritual opposite to the Slip’s open consumerism, with communication and information the priority. She has the J-Net take on an avi when she’s in it, a thick-wheeled, low-slung cater-bike, clumsier than a Slip avi, and inexplicably impersonal.
This time she’s in an avi like her own body but angular and cast in ugly shades of steel and black, almost like a robot––she had no idea human-shaped avis were even possible. And this J-Net, it’s nothing like it should be. Half collapsed to filthy, grim-faced ruins, and empty of any avi-chles. There’s a muted buzz somewhere, like a broken cable dancing insane electric patterns on damp concrete.
Hello? she calls, tentative, feeling like sound is some sort of intrusion. Anybody here?
A shifting, human-shaped black hole, hard to look at directly, steps out of thin air directly in front of her. She nods a wary greeting, because who else could do this but the man whose call she’s been waiting for.
Breaker. You’re not coming through clear.
Apologies. The reply comes with a rushing delay obscuring the ends, like a lisp. I’m stealing frequency. I can’t keep it up for long.
So why bring me to J-Net instead of IMing? This is J-Net, right?
It’s a J-Net adjunct destroyed by the Queens. It belonged to my collective, the Movement.
That’s a new one, not entirely comforting.
Since when can they get further than Slip before Emblem yanks them back?
A while. And they mean to do far worse.
Stellar. Just freaking stellar. Why is everyone dumping psychological ballast into her brain? It’s like she’s wearing a sign or some shit. And all this bears precisely zero relevance to her task for Mother Zero.
Whatever. I sleep badly enough. I’m here for a package.
You are Amiga Tanaka, Cleaner for Twist Calhoun. The black hole fades, flickers. Comes back patchy. …need… help.
Hold the hell on, Batman. I already helped you enough, Fellows. Nice subterfuge there by the bye, but why bother? Your name is way more of a dead cert than Fellows. You know if Twist finds out what I did for you I’m a corpse? Probably worse.
Please… important. Twist… working with Queens.
Amiga’s mouth drops open, full-on gorm face. There’s no way she heard that right.
He’s not that stupid. You’re tripping.
…true. The signal fades out entirely, then comes back clear again. This frequency is hard to maintain. I have to borrow heavily. Please hear me out.
Desperation has its own timbre, an unmistakable pitch. It scythes through her, straight into that soft centre she likes to pretend she doesn’t have. Fucking hell.
Fine, she snaps. Speak.
There’s a Haunt, name of Shock Pao. In less than twelve hours he’ll crack Core for Twist and take Emblem.
What? Pao will what? No. No way.
But as she’s dismissing the notion a few puzzle pieces snap together in her mind. A distracted boss. Three Haunts dead. Being called off Pao’s tail out of the blue when Twist had very much wanted him laid out like a side of salmon. She’d assumed he’d let it go for the time being to nudge other crime lords off the scent, but maybe not. Maybe he called her off Pao because he realized he might need him?
If it’s Emblem he’s been angling for, then all of this—those dead Haunts and his hot/cold gunning for Pao—starts to make an awful kind of sense. And Breaker thinks Shock will succeed where they failed?
Core can’t be cracked. Pao is a dead man.
Shock will succeed, I assure you, and he’ll need protection when he does.
From Twist? There’s an amusing concept, and an unlikely outcome.
And other crime lords who’ve been watching Twist with great interest. Please, this is serious.
I get that, I do. But it has nothing to do with me. All I want to do is fetch this package and go before my headache becomes terminal. Look, Breaker, Haunts are smoke, and this one’s a full-on weasel. Trust me, if he manages this, he’ll poof like a magician’s rabbit.
Shock is no longer a Haunt.
What? Explain.
No time. Get to him first, Amiga Tanaka. Protect him. Bring him to the Heights. To me. The Queens have me here, but I can help him, and he will need my help. Breaker flickers out of view. Comes back piecemeal, see-through. You don’t want… Emblem… wrong hands… terrible. He’s fading away as he speaks, and then he’s gone. Kapoof.
Amiga throws her arms up. Oi! Still fucking here! She looks around, seething with rage. How the hell do I get home? She turns in a circle, looking for a link-up, anything. This place is a wasteland. No way in or out she can see. Goddamn it.
She drops to the ground, cross-legged. Waiting. He wants her out there helping him, so he’ll find a way. He better do anyway. And if she gets back IRL, what does she do with this whole Emblem boosting business? For reals? If it’s the real deal. Twist has indeed been going through Haunts, but that’s the only bit she’s certain of. The whole idea of a Queenly alliance… the theft of Emblem; she doesn’t know enough to verify it.
So what if she assumes this might be true, for the sake of argument? Well then there’s one aspect that bothers her more than the rest, something of a bum note in fact—Breaker’s insistence on bringing Shock to the Heights. Why would he do that? The Queens’ server is at Heights, and Breaker said they have him there. His exact words. So if this is all true, does that make Breaker a prisoner or a collaborator? Hard to tell. As always, given the choice between trusting and not, Amiga strikes for the latter.
Too dodgy by half, she mutters to herself.
A rushing noise like a mono accelerates toward her. Hits much the same, slamming the package into her drive and throwing her backward, yelling obscenities, into that tunnel. T
his time there’s no screeching noise, only the pain of being squeezed like toothpaste through a too-tight conduit.
When she falls out again, she’s still in Deuce’s arms, and her mind feels bruised, tattered, raw, like someone’s taken a cheese grater to the inside of her cranium. She sees Knee Jerk’s turned up whilst she was gone, Vivid too. They’re sat either side of Deuce, watching her.
“Hey, why didn’t you get everyone around?” she croaks, and realizes her throat is dry enough to crack apart. “Make it a party.”
Deuce shakes her. “Hey. Hey. Where’d you go?”
He’s got this traumatized look she doesn’t like. Oh no buddy, you can’t still care. No fucking way. Amiga wrestles her way up out of his arms, paying no attention to the raw hurt on his face. Her beer is where she left it, thank fuck. She downs the other half as if she’s been in a desert for a week.
“Breaker called,” she says when she’s done, lobbing the empty bottle into her sink and wincing at the clatter. She sends Maggie the package and waits for her response, going over and over everything Breaker said, vastly annoyed with him and feeling handled. Still reluctant to believe, she thinks of a way to be sure of at least some of Breaker’s claims. She turns to Deuce, who’s watching her like she might explode, like he might.
“Gotta question.”
“Shoot.”
“J-Net. The Queens have been breaking it, yeah?”
He stares at her. “Who the hell told you that?”
“Who do you think? And not just told, shown firsthand. What I want to know is this: could they do more, and have they tried to?”
His face closes off. Security doors slammed tight. Hoo boy. Secretive and more secret. She just loves these reminders about how her job makes her not trustworthy enough, they don’t sting at all.
“Deuce, I need to know.”
“Yes they could, and yes they have,” he says quietly, clearly unhappy with revealing this much. Shit. So here’s the clicker.
“Okay, so… would they try to, I dunno, work with a crime lord maybe?”
A look of sheer panic flits across Deuce’s face.
“Who? Who are they working with? What did Breaker say, Amiga?”
Amiga lets him hang for a minute, not out of any spite; her head’s just gone a little fuzzy around the edges again. Yeah, and here comes that nausea. Breaker she doesn’t know and does not trust, especially considering his close proximity to the Queens’ server. Deuce she’d trust with her life, like it or not, and she doesn’t.
If he thinks it’s possible the Queens could access outside help, then she has to accept it. Problem. Because that means it’s possible they could actually end up boosting Emblem, and there’s no way in hell she can let it end up in Twist’s hands. Or anyone else’s. Including the Queens’. Do ants even have hands? Who the fuck cares.
“Breaker said that within the next twelve one Shock Pao, idiot Haunt, will steal Emblem for Twist and the Queens.”
Deuce looks downright bewildered.
“But…?”
“Yeah. My thoughts exactly, and yet Breaker insists not only is Emblem boost-able now for whatever reason, but Pao’s going to do so imminently. So I reckon we need to bypass the “oh my gods” and get straight on to the afterglow, just in case he’s not huffing fumes and tripping.”
“What does he want us to do?”
“Not us. Me. I’ve been told to grab Pao before he gets Emblem to Twist and take him to Breaker at the Heights, but I have severe reservations. I think he’s safer here for the time being.”
“Haunts can’t simply be grabbed, not unless you know where they’re going to be,” Vivid points out helpfully.
“Normally true, Vee, but according to Breaker this one’s thoroughly borked his Haunt-fu somehow and become a walking target for every crime lord in the Gung.”
“And you want to bring him here?” KJ, worried for his own hide as usual. Honestly, she likes the guy, adores his cooking, but he’s such a goddamn liability.
“This is the safest place I know, Knee Jerk. Cool your panties down.”
“You just got yanked right out of your head in the safest place you know,” Deuce reminds her.
“Breaker had my direct IM, and I’ve a feeling that whatever line he was using is gone now,” she says. Then adds casually, just dropping it in there or out there or whatever, “It’s not as if your block works for direct IM.”
He shakes his head. He’s got no shame, the fucker, none whatsoever.
“Nope. It wouldn’t.” He reaches out, touches her arm. “What’s going on with Breaker, Amiga? Why is he at Heights?”
“The Queens have him there. Not sure why, but as you rate him I’ll assume for your benefit that it’s not because he wants to be.”
“Shit.”
Maggie’s response pings into Amiga’s IM. She wants to meet now. On a head like this? Terrific. Grabbing a pair of thick green leggings from the table, Amiga yanks them on and stuffs her feet into Bladers. She grabs her bag and smiles at them all hopefully.
“Anyone got a migraine tab? The inside of my head is like a bare arse on melted tarmac. I do not fancy blading in this condition.”
Vivid digs in her backpack, chucks her a tab.
“Where you going?”
“I have a date with Maggie concerning our EVaC, and you guys need to get a move on locking this place down just in case we need to. I’m hoping to fuck not.”
Amiga glances down at Deuce. He’s watching her, those black eyes shuttered. She knows what he’s thinking though. She wishes he wouldn’t.
“I’ll be back this evening,” she says.
He nods. “We’ll talk then.”
“No,” she says softly, “we won’t.” And she jumps onto the table, her hands reaching for the exit hatch.
PART TWO
Journey to the Centre of the Hive
Shock groans, burrowing his face under the pillow to escape the insistent knock of sunlight on his eyelids. He’d stay there all day if he could, cocooned, but it occurs to him that he’s slept and very soundly too from the drool slicked across his cheek, the thick goo of his head. Wasn’t there something he needed to do? Some countdown ticking away?
Memory hits like a siren, alarms ringing, adrenal kick on overload, sending him ricocheting upward, his pillow flying into the mesh of his cage with a dull clang. Similar clangs echo through his skull.
“Uuurrrgh.” Is all Shock can manage initially as, in accompaniment to waking, the re-fried brain meats sensation of the drone signal asserts itself, alongside weird, sticky, not otherwise specified nausea. A mixture of too hungry and hungover as hell. Shock hopes the block is still working. It all depends on how much of his forty-eight hours he’s slept away.
“What’s the time?” he slurs out, glaring through his cage at the five other occupants of the room, all sat in their own cages, slurping either tea, bowls of steaming noodles or soup. Could be breakfast, lunch or dinner for all he knows. The smell makes his stomach moan.
Apart from Shock, no one in this room, hell, no one in this building is below the age of ninety, and his roommates are all well over their first century. Mr Yoichi, 153 years old with a squint and a halo of white hair fine as dandelion seeds, points a trembling finger at Shock.
“Use your drive, boy.”
“Please, old Uncle, my head is pounding. If I access my drive it may explode. Consider the mess.”
Mr Yoichi makes a big deal of reaching back into his cage and fetching this ancient pocket watch he claims was passed down to him from his father, because of course men of his age can’t be expected to use a fucking accurate neuro-drive for time.
“It wants twenty minutes to ten.”
Shock takes a moment or two to process as it was supposed to be twenty to something a lot earlier. Panic hits like a faceful of concrete, sending him scrambling out of his cage and across to the bathroom.
“You overslept, you fucking idiot,” he tells his stupid face in the mirror.
It stares back at him, looking as bad as he feels and pale from sleep. Too much fucking sleep. He can’t believe it’s almost ten o’clock. Ten o’cock-up.
Racing out into grey skies, he wants to head straight for his Slip shop of choice, but Slipping this deep on an empty stomach is asking for trouble, so he stops off at Some Dim for a steamer of siu bao and a coffee. No, two coffees. Make that three. Frankly he needs to dive head first into the giant coffee urn behind the serving station. Syrupy sleep combined with this hideous signal tar hangs a gloopy weight from various muscle groups, and has him feeling, bizarrely, like a mixture of chewy and snappy toffee, what with the whole panic thing and no bumps to take the edge off.
“Today’s going to suck giant balls,” he says, tearing apart a bun and trying not to envisage that thick red centre as his own vitals oozing out. There are moments when he’s actually thankful for the iron cast to his stomach. Seriously, he could eat Yook Hwe in a slaughterhouse, fresh from the cow.
He takes a final coffee to go in a paper cup so enormous he’d take bets on being able to bathe in it and heads for the mono and Foon Gung’s crowded and exclusive centre. By the time he gets off, thin drizzle paints the sky slick and flimsy as old celluloid, bringing a damp chill to the air, into the bones. Feeling as miserable as the day, Shock huddles into his too-thin neoprene jacket, and dodges tight-pressed cars out for blood.
Worried Twist’s block is already near to being broken, he’s twitching like he’s necked a handful of top-notch bumps; skin breaking beats, hair on end, eyes wired, transmitting anxiety on every known frequency. Shock doesn’t get the freaks on like this, full body power-up, stage fright, Slip fright, but this job is a different beast, horned and dangerous.
Tucking his hands in his pockets to hide the tremors, he heads for the Slip shop on level twenty-two of the Gangway tower. Located bang smack on the edge of the inner city, Gangway is a shopping mall for the rich and famous and hardly anyone knows of the Slip shop in its belly. The rich have home kiosks or internal uplinks, and they rarely use this place. Yet here it stands.