Revenge for Lychee

by Aies Jay

  -Mister Star?

  I look up. The nurse is nodding at the door from behind her glass. I get up and wobble to the door she nodded me at. My head gives a little spin. When the hell did I last eat? Breakfast? Did I have any? Did I eat lunch at all today? Sometimes I forget.

  The doc’s office is clean and the walls are full of diplomas and photographs of men in suits shaking hands with each other. I realize two things here. One, he’s overcompensating for working on Scorpio 2 as a regular doc that has almost zero cred if you compare to the cyberdocs. Two, he’s a still neat, clean, respectable fellow and I’m neither. In addition, I probably smell like alcohol underneath the coffee. He gives me a look, top to bottom and makes a strange smile, like he’s smiling through a stomach ache. Maybe he is, or maybe it’s that synthetic suit with that ridiculous old fashioned white lab coat over it that’s chafing his ass. A vague memory of him creeps up in my mind but no more. I don’t like him. Just that look of his on me has reverted me back into a teenager. The name plate on the desk makes it no better. Doctor Eugene Rookworth. Was he born on Luna or what? No. Then he wouldn’t be here. Or is he here to get back at daddy for marrying the help or something?

  -Jeremy Star?

  He says my name with a double question mark, like most people. I extend my hand, refraining from pointing out that my last and first names were all given to me, not chosen. My parents’ last names were Mason and Lee. Star was given me by the last person who held custody of me and I’m not fucking changing it.

  -Doc.

  I notice one more thing as he bows his head down into his papers. He’s a virgin, not a knife’s been near him except the ones he’s held to cut in other people. He looks up at me again and his eyes promise not to comply.

  -My condolences again on your son’s death. I remember the case well, and I performed the autopsy myself. I understand you received a paper copy already from the nurse in the reception?

  -Uh-huh.

  -And she’s explained to you that you signed the papers, waiving the tissues remaining from the autopsy?

  -I was in grieving. I’ve become religious as of late, and I realize the soul cannot rest unless the body is put to rest intact-

  -I’m sorry. You signed the waiver.

  I stop my ranting for a moment as the nurse from the front counter sneaks in apologetically to get something from one of the locked cupboards behind him but continue as soon as I can.

  -Like I said, I was in grieving. If there’s anything left of my son here, I want it.

  -The waiver states clearly that when you sign you understand fully what it entails. You shouldn’t have signed it if you were so distraught.

  I get mad, something that doesn’t happen a lot these days. That little strange anger in my heart is taking hold, and is slowly relieving me of the paralysing grief, it seems. I’m not sure if that’s bad or good yet. Right now it’s not great, docs don’t respond well to anger but I have had it with his inhuman white coat routine.

  -Maybe you shouldn’t have given it to me to sign when I was distraught! Why is this all my fault? Just give me my son!

  He gets up slowly, his dull eyes hardly reflecting any emotion. My anger seems to only have made him cooler emotionally.

  -Mister Star. What you just said confirmed everything I suspected. This is a stage in the grieving process that you’ve handled poorly. You can’t have your son back because he’s dead, your fault or not, and that is a fact. You’re looking for someone to blame and I won’t take it. You ask me for something I can’t give you, to be able to pass your anger on. Lychee Star is dead, if you wonder why, there’s a full autopsy report in your hands. He was also prematurely born and babies are always more susceptible to disease and those prematurely born even more so. I did everything I could and I’m sorry it wasn’t enough. Everything has been done according to regulations after that. You can’t have him back. Furthermore, I suggest you get grief counselling.

  His words sting but are hard as hell to argue with. The nurse is trying not to look like she’s eavesdropping. I feel my minutes I’m given to reason with the man slipping away. I lower my voice a bit, trying to calm down.

  -Listen, doc, please, I need those tissue samples. I read something yesterday and I might have stumbled upon what killed Lychee and I-

  I almost shirk as he raises his voice into a bark and leans over his desk, grabbing at its edges almost getting up.

  -Enough! I knew it wasn’t religion, it never is with you hackers! You found some conspiracy that states I used his body for making some serum or something, didn’t you? That all doctors are necros, and there’s nothing that will ever serve mankind in whatever we do, right? Unless we stuff you people full of metal junk that makes gaming more real so you don’t have to take care of your actual bodies and just stay in the System, all brains and nerve endings, making fun of anyone who chooses to live differently!

  My anger flares again to meet his but also a sliver of fear finds its way into my voice. This is going way south and fast.

  -I never said such a thing! I just want the samples back, anything you have, the tissues, the swabs, I know he was cremated properly and I never said you didn’t try-

  -This is real life, Mister Star! No rebooting, no second chances, no new game! The results of it are here to stay and no dust buster code can erase that!

  The lack of sleep, blood sugar, his spit in my eye, and maybe even the alcohol left in my system, pushes me over the edge. I get up too, reach of the table and grab his shirt.

  -My son may have been murdered for profit! Just give me the damn samples so I can sleep at night! PLEASE!

  I get no further. I never saw him push a button or even heard the door open but a guy in a security outfit puts a steel hard grip on me by slipping his arms under mine and yanking them back, off the doc. He laces his hands behind my neck and I’m bent forward, seeing only the desk and hearing the doc gasp

  -Get him out of here.

  The security man drags me brusquely and unsentimentally through a back door from the doc’s office, sparing me the humiliation to be seen by the other patients in this unflattering fashion. He drops me by just releasing me and giving me a mild shove in the back that doesn’t even send me into the street, just two stumbling steps forward. I turn to look at him. I was right. His suit is rough, dark canvas, he has a Taser by his side I bet he’s never had to use, as well as a las gun under his jacket but his body isn’t nearly bulky enough to justify that strength. He’s a body modifier, one of the guys who come to Scorpio 2 not perusing the hacker’s ideal, the mind and marrying the System by being able to plug the brain straight into a Gate. They instead hop up their bodies, overriding the physical limits, spending all their creds on body amplifiers like neuro polishing, skeleton braces and muscle boosters. He’s a pro, maybe even an old space cowboy judging by how he handled me just now. His haircut is a smooth shave and his voice a cool professional

  -Don’t come back until we’ve forgotten you, kid.

  “Kid”. Body mods never stop calling hackers kids, it’s just one of those things, like competing schools, worshipping opposite doctrines of what’s holy. In all fairness though he could have painted the street with my face if he’d wanted to but I don’t care about fairness right now. I crack my knuckles at him. He raises one eyebrow, daring me to test him. I give him another look and remember the strength in his arms. He’d break me in half before breaking a sweat. I settle for a

  -Flesh licker.

  and walk away in the night, despair again wrapping itself around me as a blanket but despair never stopped me from anything. In my youth I could even hack and cry at the same time. I suppose I’m not that old after all. And the anger in my heart is taking hold.

  born to be wasted

  -Hey, Star man! Long time.

  I nod at the kid in the hole in the wall. Wan is of Chinse descent and his family is just one of the hundreds, maybe thousands of people who consider themselves the same, who decided that to keep their ancient cu
lture alive, they’d set up shop as a restaurant on one of the arcs. If the legend holds, Scorpio 2 was the arc that launched from Asia during the Exodus, filled with people who’d spent the last centuries hating each other’s guts and killing each other. A couple of more centuries in cold space being endangered species all known as Homo sapiens changed that. Now about thirty percent of the population here can be recognized for something in the proximity of what once was known as Caucasian, me being one of them if that was ever of any importance, due to the liner sized ship we call S2 continuously travelling the habited Universe, dropping off and picking up people as it goes along. Most people born here don’t leave but the birth rate is low like on most liners and according to statistics, about fifteen percent of the people here with live-in status weren’t born here. The tourists and travellers make up for almost thirty-five percent of the hunk of living flesh on board at any given time. It’s a mess, but it’s beautiful, and I never minded living here. The street signs are in six different languages at some places, most often at least three, with Mittenk as the space language evolved by mathematicians as we left Earth in the Exodus about a millennia ago. It caught on as a diplomat’s language and as an attempt of keeping morals up that this wasn’t the end, just another massively destructive beginning, or so most people think. Fact of the matter is that Mittenk was developed to be spoken to aliens, even if we so far haven’t officially found any. Mittenk has little or no pronunciation laws, tempus is made up by concrete words much like in Chinese, and no difficult sounds are used. The alphabet is reduced to twenty letters, excluding R, P, C, and F and the letters remaining has one pronunciation only. I know it but rarely use it.

  The lights and delights of Scorpio 2 still have some charm to me, the never ending smells of food from the different kitchens mixing with the smell of melting plastic, steam, hot steel and neon, but the true treasure of this place is its connection to the System. The Gate System, Brainworm, is so hot, and the connection to the GalactiNet is good beyond any place I’ve heard of. The going is so smooth in there, the ride is like wet silk and the link ups are fast and painless. People with low storage come here for the zips that can fit info almost twenty times the size of intel of any other place, the upgrades for software are the best in the Universe and if it’s cybernetic blackware, it was mostly likely made here behind the back doors to the Gate and Puter shops, crafted by mad geniuses that only sees flesh as an inferior metal, hard to ply but not impossible to work with and graft the most impossible things to or even into it. I’ve had my temptations but so far I’ve stayed off blackware. The cyberdocs and surgeons here doesn’t hesitate to graft entire Gates into the most dedicated hackers that has no intention to live past their twenty-first, knowing fully their brains won’t cope should they change their minds, fried beyond any recognition and needing anti-rejects every single damn day, lest the hardware starts creeping out of them. Having said that, it’s not all ware merchandize and surgery here. There’s still enough to lure the most picky of tourists here even if they’re fleshy virgins with no interest in the knife. There are massage parlours, Martial Art studios, AI brothels, casinos, restaurants, Dojos, Buy and Trades with a greater variety of goods than you’d find anywhere else due to the tourist flow, candy shops that import all their stuff from Rimmie, a Water Palace big enough for over a thousand visitors at the same time during Planet side season and of course multiple Arcades you couldn’t even dream up if you tried, filled with games of every single sort, crammed with a cacophony of sounds, flashing lights and sensory input enough to make you dizzy. I close my eyes a moment and smell it all, trying to use the pleasure given me by the scent of it all before giving Wan my order. I’m still not getting hungry.

  -One sweet and sour delight, one squid with vegs, a box of veggie spring rolls size “tubbie” and hot sauce to go with it, extra rice plus prawn crackers.

  He grins at me.

  -Going deep, are we?

  I nod. This was my regular order for a long time, way back before Lychee, and he’s been working here since he was old enough to hold a ladle, now pushing twenty. I ordered my midnight special when I’d be going deep into the System, or did a storming of some base or another, nicking things that weren’t mine and selling them off to the highest bidder or just giving them away. I never considered it stealing. I still don’t. The second Code clearly states that software is information and information is free, and anything else is basically the same as telling someone to go left when you know perfectly well that it’s in his best interest to go right.

  -Yup. Carbs and sugar, a little vitamins and a hint of fibre, just to keep the old belly on its proverbial toes.

  I say, almost like a litany.

  -Coming right up.

  He shouts my order into the tiny kitchen behind him to the other guy who starts cooking up the bag of yummies I’m about to devour. Wan starts popping down the stuff into boxes as it comes out, spring rolls and rice that were done already for fast orders, pouring sauce into small plastic tubs and snapping them shut.

  -I hadn’t seen you for so long, I thought you dead.

  -Was close.

  I reply, with no further intention of going any further.

  -I heard Yun Ghosted herself.

  He continues, his voice gentle but prodding. I shake my head.

  -There is no Ghost.

  -Didn’t you two get a kid?

  I sigh.

  -”My world is my own”.

  He shuts up. He’s no hacker, just an expensive com link and a single jack in him for gaming and communication, but like all people on S2, he knows the Codes by proxy and shuts up. A minute later he hands me the rest of my order, all in a Newpaper bag.

  -Hey, I’m sorry, man.

  I don’t know if he’s sorry for Lychee, Yun or the trespassing into my private world.

  -Never mind.

  I reply, pay up and leave him behind.

  My home is one of those makeshift tiny houses built on a bridge over the Atrium. They were added as the place grew and motor traffic nearly nulled, just before the invention of the honeycomb apartments but after the coffin hotels. They were meant to be luxury pads but as it turned out they were way too expensive and small for anyone to want for what they were actually getting, the constant bridge traffic was louder that the walls could keep out and in the end they were sold as cheap, well equipped three room hovels with a weird view. I moved here when I was sixteen when I’d won it in a small Tournament held by people who just wanted to promote their new gaming company, using a Tournament with their new and only game, “The Beheader”. The game was crap and the company died within a year but I still got a place to call my own. It was a mess even then, they hadn’t even bothered to fix it up after buying it from the broker and handing it to the winner. The only thing working in it was the combination shower stall and toilet (that lovely creation called a “poo-stall” by space travellers) and the fridge but I didn’t care. To me, that was more than enough. I loved that place at first sight, coming into the tiny hallway with the combination living room/ kitchen to the left up a stairs, the bathroom straight ahead, and then the nook of a bed room past the kitchen area to the left, behind the bathroom. The third room to the left of the bedroom right next to the kitchen I only ever used for storage, old Puter and Gate parts, the only furniture in there is a desk and a chair. I intended to use it as a Gate room but I usually never get any further than the couch, plus, that room is really tiny, hardly more than a walk-in closet with a window. I spent a good weekend and 5000 creds that weren’t mine on cleaning and sprucing the place up and come Monday, the place was my castle. Yun moved in a week after I met her and we spent our wedding night and honeymoon there, happy as could be. Our marriage wasn’t long but it was until death did us part. I mourned her passing like the last light leaving my life but I’m still angry at her for killing herself. It looked like she’d tried Ghosting but after twenty-one, it’s basically just suicide as far as anyone is concerned. She was a hacker like me, m
ore of a player than a programmer, good at finding cheats in games and she could kick ass in any gaming Tournament. Her Avatar was a slick water demon, name W4ve. The wave and the lionfish. We were happy, her and I. Her long, often tangled hair used to get in my face when we slept, waking me up. Her laughter was a bubbly snorting fury and she had a tendency of using three more plates or cups than she really needed at any meal. Her favourite drinks were smoothies, then she could skip out on proper food. We got married at nineteen, promising everlasting love and not Ghosting but both of those promises are now broken by her. She couldn’t survive losing our son, I get that, but like I said, she fucking abandoned me. I haven’t kept anything of hers, or anything of Lychees, since it all hurt too much to look at. All that’s left is the picture on my shelf with used info chits. We snapped it ourselves an hour after coming home for the first time with Lychee when he was just a new-born. Yun looks exhausted but happy, I’m holding the camera while grinning like an idiot and Lychee’s looking right into the camera like “what?”. Looking at that also hurts. So why do I keep it? Because whenever I try to throw it away I lose my mind and dig through the garbage until I find it again, have a massive cry and then pass out when I’m too tired to cry anymore. I tried three times. No more. It’s the first thing I see as I step into my hovel tonight as well, like all the times since we printed and framed it, and it will be the last thing I see as I fall asleep on the couch. I haven’t slept in the bed since Yun died.

  I go inside my hovel, sweet hovel, step out of my shoes by the door and put the food down on the sofa table next to my home Gate, clicking it on. It hums ominously, like an old oracle going into a trance and I know the sounds of the clicking that follows by heart. As it starts up I take three steps to the left, entering the kitchen area to grab chopsticks and a Jackhammer soda from the fridge and then sit down, opening the cartons of delights cooked after ancient recipes. I start shovelling food into my mouth as I wait to hook up, watching the screen going over the process of waking up the hardware and kicking the software into gear. A huge lionfish appears on the screen, its colours shifting in absurd random combinations as the Gate loads all the shit I have planted on it. I can’t even count the times I’ve picked it apart and hooked up new stuff to the hardware and still, I’m no hardware worker, I’m a freaking hacker and software programmer. Imagine how much shit I’ve put in the software. I’m halfway through the sweet and sour dish as the greeting text pops up