by Sarah Stone
The man stepped in front of him, blocking his path with an aura that suggested he thought nothing of the action and in no way expected it to be interpreted with hostility. For all the man’s skill at running the team, he was often rather tactless, and obviously missed Hayden’s mixture of annoyance and trepidation as he began to speak.
“Didn’t stay in there long. Everything okay, cowboy?”
Hayden nodded, hoping he didn’t look winded from the fight. Even a short battle in MassNet was still a battle. Though he didn’t feel nearly as exhausted as he had during his initial fight with Sun, having only played a brief supporting role on this occasion, he still felt tiredness tugging his eyelids down, despite the adrenaline still working its way through his system. He didn’t need the forced sleep he’d fallen into last time, but he certainly wouldn’t be diving back in again in the next several hours.
Dammit, he knew he was going to need to pop a few balance pills. All that work making meditation his substitute and this wild job had put him right back on the meds.
“Fine,” he answered, trying on a smile. “Just a bit of surveillance. We had to pull the drones out though, too much risk of detection in that sector. E-Bloc is buzzing around like flies on shit, makes it tough to get a plan and stick with it, but we’ll get back again later, we are getting the hang of making it a team effort.”
Overdog looked accepting enough of the explanation, though Hayden saw the slightest tug at the corner of his mouth, though whether it was a smile or a frown he couldn't tell. “Problems with the equipment, or just bad luck?”
“Luck,” Hayden said quickly. “Probably my luck. I’ve had a lot of that lately.”
The man chuckled. “I hear you there. Check in with me again later if you make any headway.”
“Will do,” Hayden returned the man’s parting nod and swept from the operations center without being stopped again. He considered it an accomplishment. Overdog had clearly not believed a word of Hayden's story, but the old slinger was willing to let it go. Could be the manager thought Hayden was pursuing a grudge against Sun and was out there hunting for her, or that Hayden and Nibiru wanted to score some extra points with Bascilica by making some unscheduled progress. Or it might have been even simpler than that.
Hayden was a producer, a go-getter, and despite his unorthodox methods, he got things done. The slinger could almost feel some of his banked goodwill and reputation get spent during that interaction. He knew that next time Overdog would want results, or else.
The walk to Nibiru’s workshop felt longer than it should have. It was just a short walk down the hallway, and normally, it felt like one. Hayden’s feet seemed to drag on the carpeting. He could not shake the hesitation that seemed to slow his movements or the anxiety coursing through him as he finally knocked on the door. He waited, his palms beginning to sweat, but there was no answer and when he tried the knob, it wouldn’t turn.
Hayden was a man used to acting with confidence, making his way through life with certainty, if not in the situation at least in himself and this was not like him. He was a decisive person, a driven slinger, and now he was beginning to question everything. This was not good.
There was no light spilling out from under the door. He could only assume she was already gone, perhaps delivering her report of his behavior to Captain Mitchell.
She might not have seen what he saw, but from her vantage point of being patched with him during the run, she would certainly have seen enough to know he'd temporarily gone rogue.
He didn’t want to think the thoughts without proof of their truth, but they came unbidden, brought to life by the growing anxiety clouding his brain.
It was monumentally stupid, what he had done. If he had wanted to help the Akiaten there were a dozen other, low profile ways he could have done so. All he needed to do was wait until he had the datascape to himself.
And yet, his reaction had been prompted by a very specific set of circumstances, it had not been premeditated. He had simply seen the faces of people who had helped him on the target list and felt compelled to help them in return. This place was getting to him, changing him, or was it revealing something already there, values from his early years that had been buried under mountains of success and awarded privilege.
Hayden let his hand drop from the knob. If he was screwed, he was screwed, and no amount of damage control was going to make a difference.
He spent the afternoon in his own workspace, avoiding any sort of interaction like the plague. He only entered the datascape once more, this time through CodeSource, knowing his body needed a rest before he put it through the wringer of MassNet again.
He felt out of place and tightened up the defensive grid while he waited for the hammer to drop, as though he didn’t belong in HQ after the skirmish in MassNet.
He couldn’t settle back in, and he supposed it was a good thing. Maybe it would prepare him for the moment when they hollowed him out. He wasn’t sure what would happen actually; getting hollowed wasn't all that common in Union Americana, at least amongst the upper echelon of skilled operators such as himself.
Any corporation who paid so well had little trouble garnering loyalty. By the time operators reached his level of achievement and access they were thick as thieves with the corporation, bound by a complex web of debt, non-compete contracts, titanic incomes and the posh lifestyles that such wages could afford them.
There was the occasional new hire who let themselves be talked into money from another company in exchange for information or security codes, hence the lengthy probationary periods for green operators, but they weren’t usually killed, as far as Hayden knew, just hollowed.
The hollowing process was catastrophic, but at least it wasn't a bullet in the back of the head and a trip to the incinerator. The offender would be temporarily imprisoned under the guise of "debriefing" while all their company related assets were recovered and liquidated, which included any and all property or investments the offender had paid for with company wages, then they were shipped back to wherever in the world they came from with a black mark on their record that meant no rival firm of any prestige would hire them on.
In just a few days the hollowed offender would be financially ruined and unemployable, not to mention usually homeless. There were other, darker, industries that fed off such corporate castaways, as there was always a market for skilled people with nothing left to lose and Hayden shuddered at the thought.
Outright betrayal in the form of double agents was even rarer and their fates were no secret. They were disposed of whenever possible, but only after the Union was absolutely sure that no more information could be wrung out of them.
He wondered which category he would fall into. Things got crazy during firefights, so he was confident he could talk his way out of a summary execution, though if management caught wind of the data cache he'd all but helped Lunatic 8 recover, he'd get hollowed out for sure.
When the knock on his door sounded at half-past eleven that night, he stood in front of it, ready for the cold metal of handcuffs to slot around his wrists. They’d get one of the security operatives to do it, he was sure, one he didn’t know.
Though he was by no means an expert, it would make sense if such things were always handled in a way that left minimal risk for unexpected sentimentality. That was the kind of leader Captain Mitchell was for certain, though it was possible the soldier would want to clap Hayden in irons himself after all their interpersonal conflict.
He grasped the doorknob with the same hesitant grip that had fumbled at the door of Nibiru’s workspace earlier. Fuck this island, he thought, in a few short weeks it had all but ruined his life by forcing him to make impossible choices. Maybe they'd take it easy on him because of his service record, spare him the surgeon's blade and leave him with his jacks in place so that he could at least eke out a meager existence slinging on the black market.
Yeah, right. No mercy in the Union.
A voice stopped him before his wrist t
urned.
“It’s just me, Hayden.”
Some of the tension in his shoulder ebbed away as he opened it. He was still expecting to see Nibiru flanked by operatives and relaxed further when she saw her alone. “No firing squad?” he asked.
She ducked her head, voice darkly amused when she answered. “They’re surprisingly hard to book on short notice. But tomorrow, maybe.”
More relieved than he could say at the lack of overt anger on her face, Hayden stepped aside. There was confusion in her eyes, but not much else.
Their rooms in this HQ were not nearly as lavish as their first set, but there was still room enough for a table with two chairs. That was where Nibiru sat as Hayden flipped on one of the bigger lamps, having before been relying solely on the white glow of his computer screen.
Hayden sat with her, fighting off the urge to start some coffee in the temperamental pot. My kingdom for a French press, he thought. Thanks to the past few days, he had developed a nasty habit of grinding up balance pills and stirring them into his coffee, but he wasn't about to let Nibiru see him do that.
They sat in silence for the longest minute in world history before Nibiru, running a hand through the already tousled blue of her hair, finally settled on the right question to ask.
“What was that?” she said, lowering her voice, worried over surveillance even in privacy. He understood the paranoia. Nibiru even speaking to him about the incident without involving management would be taken by the Captain and likely Bascilica as evidence of collusion.
When he didn’t form an answer immediately, she bulldozed forward, her chin jutting out. “In the datascape,” she elaborated, and then, “You don’t even know yourself, do you?”
He didn’t, not really.
So, he said what he felt was true.
“I had to make a choice, Nibiru,” he said, swallowing down his anxiety and trying to replace it with the conviction he had felt in MassNet during those critical moments of insanity. Then, staring his decision down, he hadn’t hesitated, and he couldn’t afford to do so now. If he could explain it in a manner that Nibiru understood, he might be given a stay of execution as it were. “You read the report, from the market, right?”
She nodded cautiously.
“They saved my life, the old man, and the woman.” He avoided Una’s name. “There were captures of them in the data cache, if I hadn’t done something, they would have had targets on their backs as soon as whoever seized it unpacked the files. E-Bloc or Asia Prime, or maybe even us, would have caught them and they'd be dead, or worse.”
Nibiru was looking at the table, her shadowed reflection on the smooth, polished wood, instead of at him. He kept going.
“I owed them that much, Nibiru. They saved my life.”
It took her a moment to lift her gaze. “It wasn’t just that,” she said, her voice betraying her frustration with him. “You’re not stupid, Cole. You’re the best slinger in the Union, by a wide margin, and don't bother denying that. You could have just,” she tossed her head back, hair flipping to one side. “You could have just snatched their info from the cache and left the other slingers to battle it out. In the time you spent fighting you could have cracked the encryption and selectively toasted those specific profiles, and then left a melter or something behind that would dissuade anyone from risking what was left to recover what you destroyed. It would have been hard, but you could have done it.” She met his eyes steadily, knowing.
In her own way, Hayden thought, she was just as observant, just as dangerous, as Laine.
“And yet you didn’t,” she continued. “It would have been a blow to the Akiaten, and instead of letting it happen, you jumped in on the same side as Lunatic 8. Sure, you burned a few E-Bloc slingers, and it looked like from what I saw, that you rattled Sun, at least a little, and that might get you some goodwill from the Union. But you didn't do it for the Union, did you? You fought for them, for the resistance.” There was nothing he could say to that but the truth. The problem being, of course, that he wasn’t exactly sure what the truth was, or wasn’t, at least his truth in relation to that moment. He wasn’t sure what he’d been thinking. Sure, he’d told himself that he’d done it for the old man and Una, but in reality, that had only been the incentive he’d needed, and not, by any means, the deciding factor. Nibiru was right, and from the look on her face, as she waited for an explanation, she was more than a little aware of it.
“I know,” he said at last. And that was it.
“Yeah,” she said, “I know, too. Just me, if—,” her voice cracked a bit here, the stress finally catching up, and he realized that the past hours had likely been just as tough for her. Hayden had simply been waiting for the security detail, but Nibiru had been stuck deciding whether or not to call them. She had his life in her hands all this time.
“If anyone else finds out, that’s it for you. This isn’t some fuck-up in the field, Hayden, or the wrong call in the datascape. You made a conscious decision to help the Akiaten, who have been classed as our number one threat since the attack on the old HQ. They take this stuff seriously.
“I'm the new kid, Hayden, it's supposed to be me making the rookie moves here. I can't believe we're even having this conversation. The world is upside down and you helped it get that way.”
“I know,” he said again before he realized that he had repeated himself and offered her a rueful smile. The one she gave him in return was a poor excuse, tinged with more sadness than anything else.
“It felt wrong,” he said, “
Not doing anything and knowing that civilians would die. They were targeting whole neighborhoods of ‘sympathizers.’ Didn’t it bother you, what happened in the fish market? I know you weren’t there in person, but—"
“Of course, it bothered me!” she snapped, looking offended at the assumption. “Do I look like an alpha augment to you?”
She was chewing on her thumbnail now; he’d never known she had so many nervous habits, but then, he’d never seen her truly worried before. Nibiru normally acted with admirable confidence in anything she was tasked to do, and the sight of her so rattled shook him.
"But this is the job. That's what we’re supposed to say, isn't it? To push through."
Hayden’s leg jounced up and down at the speed of light, jarring the table every few repetitions, a habit he thought he had rid himself of several years prior. Damn, he wanted coffee and a pill.
“What are you going to do?” she finally asked.
Something stupid, he almost said, to playfully recall the last time he'd spoken those words to her, but Nibiru didn’t seem in the mood for jokes and he found that neither was.
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “Keep my head down for now. See if…if she contacts me.”
“Lunatic 8?”
“Yeah.”
“And what if she does?” Nibiru said.
Hayden wished he had food in his room, or else the capability to slip out for a bite from one of the many late-night food stalls that adorned the street corners, just so he would have something to do with his hands and his mouth, something else to look at that wasn’t staring back. But such things were now heavily regulated and after his stint as a missing person just the other day, he would no doubt be treated with suspicion if he was insistent on leaving HQ. As it was, he had nowhere to look but at Nibiru or through her, neither of which were comfortable.
“Depends,” he said.
“On?"
“On what she asks for.”
Nibiru sighed as the put her hands over her face for a moment as if forcing her frustration and emotions back down deeper into herself before placing her hands back in her lap.
“You’ve already saved them, Hayden, the two that helped you. They saved your life, you saved theirs. The slate’s clean,” she said, sounding as though she was trying to convince them both of the truth of her words. “There’s no reason for you to feel…obligated to interfere any further. You could just—we could just do our jobs
and hope they don't end up back in the crosshairs. We’re still Union Americana.”
The words sounded hollow, but Hayden felt obligated to reply.
“So, it’s we, now?”
She rolled her eyes, a trace of her usual personality shining through the worry.
“Don’t be a dumbass. What we’ve been doing, what the other corporations have been doing, it’s wrong. There’s absolutely no denying that it’s wrong. I’ve been on field jobs before, even if they were smaller in scope and less obvious in their exploitation, but it was there, just enough under the surface that I could look away.” She shot Hayden another look before he could formulate an argument to the contrary. “I may be young, but I’m not completely inexperienced. This feels different.”
“I’m not sure how different it is,” Hayden said. She was right. It certainly wasn't the only time he’d seen awful things, but it was the first time he had stopped to truly consider his own part in them.
He had killed before, but only in MassNet, where the carnage in front of you was threaded through with shifting code, easily dismissed so long as you didn’t think too hard about what happened to your opponent when they woke (if they woke). But anyone in MassNet was expecting a fight, had signed up for one and measured the ratio of risk and reward before jacking in. Civilian killings were different. Before, he’d known they happened but had played no active role in their occurrence. On this occasion, neither he nor Nibiru could deny that without the parts they played, there would have been no trail for E-Bloc to follow to the market, and thus, no bloody aftermath.
“The blood splashed on our boots for once,” Hayden said. “It feels different, but it isn’t, not really, and that’s what scares me.”
All this time, he’d thought he was as ice-cold as Laine or Mitchell, but life by the code was different than life by the gun. Most of the blood he saw was filtered through a screen. That made it easy to look away, and suddenly, his penchant for eating the local cuisine while on field operations felt cruel.
“The Akiaten are just as violent,” Nibiru said, breaking the quiet as quickly as it could settle. “Are they really any better than the rest of us? The people are getting squeezed harder thanks to the resistance, more than they would be otherwise.”