by James Wake
Back to back. Barely time to breathe between calls.
The glass wall of a building beside her lit up, the Auktoris scarlet “A” scrolling out and leaving news updates behind. Her second call last night had made the cut, proudly announced on the news as an arrest and deportation of possible dissidents. Residing without proof of employment. Distributing food and providing medical treatment without permits.
The illuminated wall flickered then went dark, replaced by a cartoon cat face with words beneath it.
AGF IS NOT YOUR MASTER
Jackson paid it no mind. She’d seen Cheshire around plenty. Her superiors had instructed her to take the vandalism very seriously, to immediately report any possible leads. But no one knew who was behind that stupid cat, and with all the actual, physical crimes she’d seen in her time, she found it hard to care.
It happened again about a minute later, this time on a small billboard above an entryway. A civilian strolled past the building, not even glancing at the sign or its new occupant.
Jackson gave it the same lack of attention. Strange, though. Something was usually written underneath the cat face, some ranting screed about Auktoris. She shook her head. The empty AGF suits were probably just pissed that someone else was spreading bullshit around the city, cutting into their ad space.
The third time made her stop. Cheshire appeared on a small display fixed to a lamppost, again with no text. She could swear the cartoon feline was staring right at her, following her with its eyes, the whole thing made of shifting whorls of neon colors. The colors pulsed bright and then dark, as if the thing was breathing.
She took a few more steps. It was following her with its eyes. Over her shoulder, she became aware of a drone hovering in place, one of the many always flitting around the city. This one had stopped with her, matched her steps, then stopped again.
A line of text appeared under the cat’s face.
good evening, officer jackson.
She shook her head, her hand grasping the handle of her concealed carry. She walked on, ignoring the cat, her ears pricked up at the drone following her. Probably just some punks having a laugh; maybe scanned her face and realized they had a cop to mess with.
Cheshire appeared again on the side of a box truck going by, eyebrows slanted inward.
too busy to talk?
She ignored it. Kept walking and ignored it. Jackson was, in fact, too busy to talk. Very, very busy. Static buzzed in her comms implants, vibrating the bones of her inner ears and making crystal clear sound.
“Very rude to ignore a concerned consumer.”
Jackson froze. It wasn’t a voice, but many voices: men and women and children and distorted nightmare robot growls, all speaking in unison with unsettling static rising behind it. Her comms chip was locked down, police security protocols restricting access to her. No way some dumbass teens could crack into it and transmit directly.
“I know where you’re going, Officer.”
“Is that right?” she said, glaring at the drone hovering behind her.
“That is right.”
Cheshire appeared again on the townhouse to her right, his usual menacing grin replaced with a sly, toothy smile.
“Do you trust her to help you?” the voices said in her ears.
That earned a raising of Jackson’s eyebrows. No point being coy then. “I don’t. She’s not my informant. She works for my partner.”
“She does not work for Officer Ortega.”
Jackson glanced around; she was alone for the moment. “How the hell do you know all this?”
“You can trust Ortega. And you can trust me.”
“You aren’t selling yourself very well, kitty cat.”
“Bring me the transmitter.”
Jackson gripped her pistol tighter. “I ain’t giving you a thing.”
“I can help you.”
“You bring me something, we can talk.” She threw one last side eye at the drone and stomped off.
“Very well then. Free advice. Go home.”
“You know this is a secure channel, right? All this is being recorded and logged.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
That damn cat appeared on a sign in front of her again, a looping short animation of the creature winking. Jackson picked up her pace. If he—they?—were good enough to crack in, it followed that they might be good enough to circumvent the logging and recording.
Almost there, just another corner. When she finally reached the alley market, her face fell. Auktoris Security cordons blocked the entrance, a pair of faceless guards positioned in front.
Jackson crossed the street, dodging a self-driving car that blared an alarm at her as it passed, its rider not even looking up. The market was gone, replaced by security teams and a few bulldozers scraping what was left of it into a massive junk heap. APS officers stood over a line of people on their knees, hands cuffed behind their backs.
Of course. Unlicensed commercial activity. Squatting. Illegal transactions. All things Jackson had chosen to ignore about this place.
“Move along,” one of the officers told her.
She craned her neck to look past him but didn’t have to move much. She was almost a head taller than both of them. The front of the electronics shop had been smashed open, and Domes were tossing scraps of trash from the store into the alley.
“I said, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’”
“City police,” Jackson said, flashing a badge that hung from a chain around her neck.
Raising a shock prod, the Dome stepped up to her. “Leave. Now.”
She backed off, letting her badge fall back into hiding. Not worth pushing.
Now, walking felt numb and difficult—that dull ache alive and screaming in her limbs again, her feet heavy.
Stupid. It was stupid to even try, to have thought some punk in a scrap shop would give her anything.
It took Jackson a moment and a bit of aimless walking to realize she was going the wrong way. Nothing else to do but go home and get ready for another long night.
* * *
Nadia wrung her hair out over the sink, squeezing inky-black water down the drain. She had fought her heart out at La Garrud practice until late in the night, slamming through her basic strikes so hard that her joints had popped.
The hot shower helped somewhat. She was still exhausted, though.
When she’d finally squeezed most of the dye out of her hair, she looked up. Her eyes caught themselves in the mirror: dark and angry and full of hate. She closed them hard, forcing her eyelids shut until they throbbed.
When she opened them, nothing had changed. She tried again. Her hands trembled, fighting her, telling her to smash the damn mirror already and be done with it.
Snap!
She opened her eyes. Her left hand had been holding a plastic comb, now broken into several pieces. Tendrils of blood oozed from gashes in her palm.
Nadia sighed, long and loud. At least she looked like herself again.
In a few short minutes, she had sealed the cuts with gel. She dragged herself into the main office. Tess was bent over a workbench, back in a purple hoodie, this one reading, “Not Your Waifu.” Her prosthetic hand was working at a dizzying pace again, soldering something inscrutably tiny. They exchanged no greetings.
Nadia had bought a new addition to the space, a futon crammed in next to the crowd of mannequins. She collapsed onto it, her eyes slamming shut. As her muscles sighed in relief, she felt herself not drifting to sleep but plummeting straight toward it.
“New wiring. Not done yet,” Tess said, not looking up.
“Uggggh,” Nadia groaned, drawn out, far past tired.
“I’m not doing it. I suck at that part. And you’re the tailor here,” Tess said, still looking down. “You know, the ‘fashionable’ part of Functional Fashions?”
She was right. Damn her, she was
right. Fighting a yawn, Nadia picked herself up.
“Coffee,” Tess said, pointing to the table, where a half-finished turtleneck lay.
A steaming cup was waiting for her. “You’re too good to me, you know that?” Nadia said, taking a cautious sip, followed by a greedy gulp. “For a vicious slave driver, that is.”
“This was all your idea.”
“Mmm.” Nadia settled in at her table, picking up where she’d left off. The goggles required new wiring, which had to be woven and stitched into the garment so as not to restrict movement or be too visible.
As tired as she was, this felt good. Nadia would never forget the first time she had cobbled a piece of clothing together herself, a simple Sorbetto top, the pattern chosen specifically for how simple it was and how quickly she could be done with it. No one was more surprised than her when she ended up actually enjoying it.
It was a peculiar moment when it finally happened—realizing how pleasing it was to work with her hands, to create something. It had taken her the better part of two years to actually do something in class—instead of paying other, less fortunate students to prepare work for her.
So much wasted time.
She had chosen to major in fashion design primarily because she knew it would enrage her parents, one last defiant slap after demanding they send her off to boarding school and then college outside The Structure. Allowing her to assume a false family name, mingling and integrating with the lower classes, speaking to people outside the subservient bubble of her family’s company.
Her father had been proud of her. She tried not to think about that.
Nadia and Tess worked together in near silence, as they had every day and every night for two weeks now. Nadia saw and heard only the work in front of her, careful and precise, as she slowly wove the wiring through the layers of synthetic fabric. She smelled the occasional acrid stink of burning from Tess’s table, smiled every once in a while when Tess singed her soft hand, yelping and shaking it out.
Tess stood up and walked over to her favorite mannequin. It wore an APS officer’s helmet and nothing else.
“Please don’t,” Nadia said.
“I really screwed it up by punching that wall,” Tess said, raising a silly bamboo sword. She rolled her right shoulder a few times before squaring off in a kendo stance. “You know this helps.”
“I’m trying to work.”
Tess raised her toy again and brought it down on the helmet with a sharp slap.
Nadia’s shoulders tensed. The wiring she was doing slowed, her steady rhythm lost.
Slap!
She looked over her shoulder, at Tess pretending to cut down another security guard.
Slap!
“Oh, you’re so cool,” Nadia said. “Such a badass,” she added, enunciating the words as sarcastically as possible.
“I got you those nice noise-canceling earplugs and you never wear them,” Tess said. She held the sword in just her right hand, whipping out a blindingly fast series of slashes.
Slap! Slap! Slap!
“Don’t you have plenty of work to do?” Nadia asked.
“Compiling.”
That was Tess’s excuse every time she was goofing off. Nadia put the sweater down, still not finished. Her back and neck pinched as she sat up. “Refill?”
“Yes, please.”
The rest of the office was dark, empty and quiet. Her bare feet were silent on the carpet. She loved stalking through the office late at night like this; reveled in the thought of sneaking through the back halls of the jewelry store, quiet and unseen.
Nadia crept up to the edge of the break room—a maze of boxes, instant food and drink stockpiled for these long nights. She wedged herself through and topped them both off, her own with coffee and Tess with something disgusting and bright green from a can. It promised to fortify the customer with nanological enzymes, whatever those were.
Such a sad little room. There was a stove, although it might have been unplugged; she never would have known. Just like the luxurious kitchen in her apartment she’d never once used, although hers didn’t have “Omniplant Manufacturing Services” stamped on every countertop.
The slap of Tess’s bamboo sword stopped ringing out from the office. Nadia sighed in relief, her stomach growling as if she’d just woken up. From one of the boxes, she dug out two bright white containers, similar in size to the ones with slop from the fast food restaurant. Pushing a button on the side of each made a sharp pop, which she followed by shaking each container until she felt the heat through the plastic. She stacked their drinks on top and made her way out.
“Did you want chicken or tofu?” she said, entering the office. “I grabbed one of each.”
She almost dropped the whole pile. Tess was standing at her workbench, one side of her hoodie hiked up. A needle full of something clear was gripped in her artificial hand and stuck into the bare skin above her hip.
Nadia blinked; her mouth hung open, wide and dumb and gasping.
“Oh! Hey,” Tess said. “Uh…yeah. Privacy?”
“What do you mean, ‘privacy’?” Nadia said, turning around anyway. “You are in the office!”
“Well, you usually go to the bathroom after you drink coffee. Thought I had a few minutes.”
Silence. The slight sound of fidgeting behind Nadia.
“Done.”
Nadia turned back around to see Tess pull her pants up and stash the needle in a small black case she’d never seen before. “Was that…? You’re not…?”
How else could she never sleep?
“Oh, yeah,” Tess said, grinning like a madwoman. “Heroin. Uncut. The good stuff.”
“That is not funny,” Nadia said, shoving a drink into her hand.
“I don’t know… I always thought I would make a really great drug addict,” Tess said, tinkering with something on her bench. “High functioning, you know?”
Nadia watched her with intense displeasure, softening quickly as her slow, tired mind caught up. “It’s for your arm, isn’t it?”
“It’s fine,” Tess said. “I don’t like needles, though.”
Nadia leaned against the bench, then sat on its edge. Her mouth fought hard to not let the words out, but she forced them through, not wanting but needing to say them. “Would you like to…talk about it?”
“Only if you want to talk about your bathroom mirror.”
Ah. So that’s how it’s going to be…
Nadia hugged herself tightly. “Not yet.”
“Okay then.”
They sat down and ate in silence, Tess at her desk and Nadia at her table. Tess wielded chopsticks in her left hand while using her right to type in thin air, her pupils illuminated. Nadia ate her chicken—or tofu or whatever it was—hardly paying it any mind.
“I was going to invite you to that silly dance once,” Nadia said.
“Huh?”
“The annual Charity Ball. In the Structure.”
“Uh…thanks?”
Her parents had both forbidden it, no pretense of accommodation from her father. And Nadia had been too much of a coward to defy their combined might. She said nothing more.
“Done! Finally,” Tess said, putting her unfinished food aside for once. “Just gotta load it up, and…ready. Test run?”
“What’s that?”
Tess was holding up a device that wore a crude shell of a case, no bigger than the palm of her hand. Nadia actually looked at the bench for the first time since she’d gotten home, realizing the desecrated skeleton of an Auktoris security drone lay in pieces all over it.
“Magnetic acoustics,” Tess said. “Made some modifications. Should be real unpleasant.”
“Lovely.”
“Ha, almost forgot.” She popped two small plugs into her ears. “APS guys wear these to cut down on the effect. I’ve got it turned down real low right now. Let’s see what she�
��s got.”
Her fingers twitched. She let out an ear-piercing scream as she collapsed into a heap on the floor.
Nadia yelped and jumped back, spilling coffee everywhere as her right hand shook wildly. The device was on the floor, gushing smoke and sparks. Tess writhed around, face scrunched up in agony, her artificial arm violently flailing.
And then it stopped.
“Ohhhhh, wow. Wow. Ouch,” Tess moaned, clutching her head.
Nadia flexed the fingers in her right hand, feeling every bit of the wires in her fingers. She crouched over Tess and hovered her hands just shy of touching her. “What did you do?”
“You didn’t feel anything?”
“Not so much,” she lied. As Nadia ran her tongue over her teeth, she felt a tingle deep in their roots.
“Good,” Tess said, groaning again and laying out flat on her back. “Finally a reason for you not to have implants.”
Nadia nudged the device with her toe. It was still oozing gray odorless smoke. “Is that thing…stable?”
“Not quite. I figured it might be a one-shot.” Tess rubbed her eyelids. “Oh…wow. That hurt like fuck. Can’t believe that worked so well.”
“Ice pack?”
“Yes! Yes, please. Ow.”
Nadia ran back to the break room and shoved through boxes. Tess had attached a first-aid kit to the wall, of course. She popped an ice pack and shook it, feeling it turn frigid in her hands. A moment later she was holding it over Tess’s forehead.
“That’s nice,” Tess murmured, lying very still.
“So…I’m supposed to just use one of those devices every time I’m in trouble?” Nadia asked, glancing at the broken thing. “I don’t think most security guards can afford advanced prosthetics.”
“It’ll work even if they only have interaction chips or a comms setup. Not as well, though, I think. But almost everyone has those. Around here anyway,” Tess said, taking a deep breath, holding it, then sighing. “It seems to be much more effective on, uh…”
“People like you?” Nadia said.