by Danny Bell
“I’m fine,” Olivia groaned. “Can you stop playing with it?”
“Yeah, you’re fine,” I said sarcastically. “Bleeding in an alley behind a shady nightclub, hashtag blessed.”
Olivia pushed me away and braced her back on the wall to get to her feet. “No one hashtags that anymore,” she said absently, testing her weight on the injured side of her body. “Elana, what the hell are we going to do?”
I stood as well and shook my head. “Get somewhere and rest, try to get something to heal—”
“With our snake problem,” she interrupted sharply. “We just left everyone there. Logan’s family is in trouble, and you wrecked their home! How are we going to fix everything? How the hell do we fight back against all of that?”
“I… I don’t know…” my shoulders slumped hearing the question. “Bright side? They can’t follow us, they probably don’t even know where we are. Our friends are relatively safe back at the shop. Past that, I can’t focus on it right now. I just can’t, I’m sorry.”
“If not now, when?” Olivia shot back with less enthusiasm than she probably intended. She was worried, not pissed.
“After you stop bleeding and we find a way back,” I said, hoping to convey confidence. “Now come on, let’s get—”
“Not good enough,” Olivia interrupted. “When he comes back, I don’t know if we will even be alive to meet him, and if I am, he is going to…his family… I’ve wrecked everything!”
“Hey!” I snapped, surprised at my tone. “No, you haven’t. I have!”
Olivia was choking back tears, and I moved to comfort her, putting an arm around her. “This isn’t your fault.” My voice softened. I wasn’t in a yelling mood. “You know it isn’t. And it isn’t over yet, right? The only way we win is if we keep it together. Nothing has been broken yet that can’t be fixed. It’s bad, but it’s not over. Come on, I need you. Are you with me?”
Olivia said nothing until a taxi passed us on the street, sans wheels, just a gentle blue glow reflecting onto the street from the undercarriage. “They have flying cars here, and I can’t even enjoy how cool that is,” she said sourly.
I took that as a yes, and with her good arm still around me, I started walking toward the street. “I don’t know how helpful this will be,” I began carefully. “And I know how selfish it will sound, but…look, no matter how bad things get, they always get better and they could always be worse. I find that I’m my worst self when I get wrapped up in how bad things are. It doesn’t stop me, you know that better than anyone; but I’m at least aware of it.”
“I’m just supposed to ignore the mess we made of my boyfriend’s life?” she grunted.
“Of course not, we always do our best to make things right in the end and we don’t give up. Just maybe allow yourself to be impressed by a flying car for five minutes if it helps get your mind off those messes that we can’t immediately fix, you know? Thinking too much about all the bad stuff in the world, it’ll wear you out.”
It wasn’t long until she started trying to walk under her own power. “If that…this,” Olivia corrected herself awkwardly, “show hadn’t been on, if they’d had a power outage or if Andy had just gone to sleep early, we’d be dead right now. Do you understand how stupidly lucky that was? This wasn’t a planned escape.”
“Yeah, well, that and how often butterflies drink human blood are things best not spent too much time thinking about,” I said as I approached an information screen, pulling my hood up against the rain.
A holographic person of indeterminate gender appeared in front of us, smiling wider than any human ever comfortably could and offered a greeting. “Hello, and welcome to Echo City! Echo City!” The holograph blinked in and out for a second before resuming. “Oh, the citizens of our fair city certainly enjoy that one! Founded in one thirty-three AB by the Wu Long corporation, Echo City is home to—”
“Directions,” I instructed, and the holograph blinked again, coming back with a different posture.
“Certainly! Where would you like to go?” I realized how loud it was and remembered that street crime was not at all uncommon in this show.
“Volume down,” I instructed again.
The holograph didn’t just lower its sound but came back with a more reproachful tone. “Certainly. Where would you like to go?”
“Did you just disappoint the AI?” Olivia asked, and I rolled my eyes at the question. Might as well disappoint the AI, I seem to disappoint everyone else.
“Cyber City,” I said sheepishly.
A three-dimensional overhead map of the city replaced the holographic guide and showed our location and the shops via a red and green dot with a white line indicating a path there. I knew it was close from contextual clues on the show, but thankfully, it was closer than I realized. Two blocks up and one across.
“CYBER CITY, YOUR ONE STOP SHOP FOR REPAIRS AND UPGRADES!” The volume on the AI seemed to be turned up past eleven, all the way up to wake the dead. A pleasant drum beat and smooth synth sounds accompanied the guide.
“Skip!” I shouted in surprise. A small text box appeared over the AI that read “Sponsored advertisement, you may skip in 5” with the numbers counting down as it spoke over me. Some things are the same everywhere you go.
“VOTED BEST IN ECHO CITY FOUR CYCLES IN A ROW WE HAVE THE HOTTEST DEALS ON—”
“Skip!” I shouted it again as the timer reached zero, and it was abruptly quiet again.
“Is there anything else I can help you with?” The AI had immediately lowered its volume back down to “Claire catching me having beer and ice cream for breakfast” levels.
“No. Thank you,” I replied, trying to recover from the shock of being advertised at by the loudest thing I’d ever heard.
“Thank you for visiting Echo City,” the holograph said before blinking away. It hadn’t made the echo joke again. I guess I really had hurt its feelings.
The streets were oddly pretty to look at, even as tangled and unnatural as the fabrication buildings seemed to be built on top of each other and then on top of each other again. It was grimy and endlessly moving, and the two of us would be considered an infection if we hung around outside for too long. We held cell phones, and for anyone looking too hard at us, it would be like someone in our world trying to text with an etch-a-sketch. We were oddities.
Not that anyone was looking at the moment. There was plenty of commerce that was more interested in those who could pay for it. It didn’t matter if it were the spicy noodles, people in the shadows offering augmented reality assisted hallucinogens, or the synthetic people with inviting smiles and more inviting attire; they were all selling essentially the same thing. A distraction. We didn’t have time to be distracted. Not that we could afford it either way.
We made our way to the shop without incident, though Olivia had questions. Understandably, she hadn’t seen the show, but if she had, she’d know what I knew, and that was that Cyber City had exactly what we needed. She’d also know some less fortunate facts as well but, you know, spoilers.
The night sky was a fascinating mixture of blood-red streaked across a palette of indigo and stars. It was never truly dark here, not that the sign in front of us was helping any of that. Cyber City was lit up with magenta neon that would’ve been noticeable from ten blocks away and somehow muted the other signs around it; it seemed to absorb the light from the other signs into itself. Of course, it wouldn’t look this way for long, but the shop was open for the moment, and that was good enough.
“Just, okay, just,” I told her before we walked in. I wasn’t sure how to say to her that people got vaporized in this show for shoplifting, and what we were going to do in a moment was much riskier. “Don’t react to anything, just let me talk, okay?”
Olivia gave me a pained expression. “Elana, I really don’t give a shit what you’re planning to do as long as I get to sit down soon because I’m feeling way more messed up than before.”
Good enough. I opened the door an
d walked the length of the shop, basically a future 7-11 brightly lit with white LED bulbs that could’ve doubled in an x-ray machine. Maybe. I don’t entirely know how x-rays work. Another hologram appeared at the counter, this one much more advanced than the one on the street and could’ve been mistaken for a person. It had the form of an impossibly handsome Indian man in his late twenties, broadly smiling at us and wearing a long sleeve mesh jumpsuit with the Cyber City logo over his right breast. “Welcome to Cyber City! How may I—?”
“Paprika. Venus. Midnight.” I enunciated each word to the holographic AI as clearly as I could, and it certainly did the trick. The LED lights immediately turned red as the entrance to the shop was replaced by a solid sheet of steel, and the hard-light illusion of the back wall faded away to reveal a work and storage area. Mounted turrets whirred as they appeared from the ceiling and aimed themselves at us, and the AI suddenly adopted a neutral, robotic expression and stared at nothing.
There was the telltale double click of a shotgun being pumped before I saw him. He looked to all the world like a cyberpunk Lord Byron. In attire at least, he wore billowy silk pants that would be better suited as pajama bottoms and an equally billowy silk shirt with a cravat and a purple smoking jacket that matched his neatly curated purple mohawk that couldn’t have been a hair over two inches in length. He was a gentleman who cared about his appearance and all, which is why his cybernetic eye was so thoroughly polished.
“Hello there, Zinc,” I greeted him with my hands raised in surrender. The strain of spreading my fingers was an unexpected agony, but I tried not to show it.
He raised the shotgun level with my head, and I knew that with that eye of his, he wasn’t likely to miss. “Absolutely not,” he said in a regal manner of speech inconsistent with the rest of this world. “You know my override codes and my shuffler name while I know nothing of you. I promise you, dear girl, I will not hesitate to burn this place to ground with the two of you in it if my level of understanding is not sufficiently expanded soon.”
“Just one question first, are you still repairing organics?” I asked him, which narrowed his natural eye and expanded his cybernetic twin.
“A go in the med chair is twenty credits,” he said with a hint of disdain. “And you did not call me out like this for something so trivial.”
“That’s because we’re hoping to barter,” I replied, slowing my words as I went for effect. “Organic repair for information. Information that will save. Your. Life.”
Zinc was noticeably annoyed with my response and choked up on his shotgun’s grip. “Right, you’re leaving now, young—”
“Jasper Brazil installed a virus onto a maintenance node when he was here to check your system’s upgrades,” I said flatly. “He’s going to override your security measures and have you killed, along with anyone else manufacturing Overdrive, and yes, we know about that. Oh, and he’s working for the Orvo Corporation and the Ellis syndicate, though neither of them knows that he’s employed by the other. Good enough or do you need a fortune cookie to read too?”
Zinc looked genuinely perplexed in a way that I’d never seen from him on the show. “How could you know…?”
“Simple. I read one earlier. It said, ‘Trust the seemingly omniscient women literally trying to save your dumb life.’”
“Why would you tell me this and ask so little in return?” he asked suspiciously, making a recovery.
I lowered my hands finally and spread them in surrender, trying to ignore the pain that moving them brought me. “Because I probably would’ve just told you all this for free anyway, so I’m kind of just hoping you’ll be nice to us in exchange for doing you a solid. Look, we’re just a couple of organics who don’t like the syndicates or corporations any more than you. Honestly, you just dress better than them.”
That wasn’t the reason. Zinc saves my favorite character in a couple of episodes from now and, mostly, he’s honorable. As honorable as anyone in this show could be, at least. Plus, I think most people were pretty shocked and upset when he went down in the season finale.
“You will stay there and not move unless you wish to test your durability against my turrets,” Zinc said at last. “If I cannot verify what you say is true, arson is still on the table.”
“Oh, arson’s great; it should always be on the table,” I mocked. Zinc held up a warning finger as he backed away from us. “Go on. Do what you gotta do.”
Olivia waited until Zinc was gone to speak to me again. “So, just changing stories again is your plan?”
“Yes, and I stand by it.”
“And do you know how that’s going to work out?”
“No, I do not.”
We stood in place under the laser-sighted sword of Damocles for a few more uncomfortable minutes until, at last, the lights switched back to white, though now less intense, and the guns retreated into the ceiling. Olivia and I exhaled with an almost identical sigh of relief that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding in. Zinc marched back into the shop with an all too brisk pace, declaring statements that may or may not have been rhetorical. “Here is what I know,” he said louder than he needed to. “Jasper managed to shuffle his card into my system. More to the point, a nitwit like Jasper Brazil should be nowhere near that clever. I know that you know far more about me than anyone ought to, and I know you two are one hundred percent organic, something I have never seen in the city. Not even a stack or an upfeed. Incidentally, how did you manage that? Are you in some sort of cult?”
I shrugged with exaggeration. “Sure, why not?”
“Furthermore, what I do not know is how any of this is possible or even what your names are, and I know that makes me nervous, and I suspect you know what I do when I’m nervous, oh yes, but do you know what else I know?”
“All the lyrics to ‘I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General’?” I guessed. Actually, I’d pay to see Zinc sing that.
“I know I would be dead without your information, as would many of my colleagues, so I don’t need to know who you are. Quite frankly, I’m not sure that I want to. I have the feeling your sort tends to get your friends into all sorts of trouble.”
“Hitting a little too close to the bullseye, mon frère,” I said awkwardly, quietly considering literally everyone I cared about.
“In any event, it will take me the better part of the night to undo the damage you did to my systems with that hard reboot, as well as scrubbing any trace of the soon to be late Jasper Brazil.” His voice held a brief flash of venom at that name. “That in mind, the med chairs are set for the deluxe package in the back. Don’t mess with the settings, just sit down and enjoy the rest. I’ll expect you to leave after, not just my store but the city. For your sakes, really. And I left a change of clothes for your mute friend. Blood does leave a terrible stain, doesn’t it?”
Olivia looked pale from the pain and loss of blood, and she absently felt the hole in her jacket. “Thank you,” she replied sincerely.
“My word! She has words!” Zinc gave a show of mock surprise. “Now, get on with it, I haven’t got all night.”
I motioned for Olivia to follow me into the back, into a peacefully dim area save for the soft glow of a few ambient lights. I knew what the med chairs had looked like from the show, at least. It would’ve been embarrassing to just sit in a regular chair. I took off my coat and bookbag, placing them on the table next to one of the chairs. I looked down at my hand for the first time and saw that it was swollen and turned an ugly shade of purple with blue at the edges. It had actually stopped hurting and was now numb to the touch, which was concerning. It was like poking a latex glove full of jelly.
Olivia gingerly removed her jacket and other layers down to her t-shirt and underwear, letting the ruined pieces simply fall to the floor. There was a garment on her table that looked to be a wetsuit made of studded rubber. Olivia peeked at her wound and winced as she pulled back her shirt and tried to wipe away some of the dried blood. “So, this machine is going to fix us?”
It was an expectant question.
“All that ails us, apparently,” I said, sitting down. My chair seemed to hum to life, and parts of it moved slowly around me.
Olivia followed and eased herself into the other chair to the same effect. I was already falling asleep when I heard her last sleepy words. “What a time to be alive.” She yawned. “In a fictional cyberpunk world that is not our…”
It was some of the best sleep I’d ever had.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“These chairs cured our cancer!” Olivia was aghast as she studied the readings on the screens in front of our chairs. “Elana! We had cancer!”
“Pre-cancerous material point, oh, oh, oh, eight-five, and point oh, oh, oh, oh, one-two percent respectively,” I corrected somewhat indifferently as I glanced at our screens. “The machines probably removed a mole or two. Now come on, get dressed, and try to act like you’ve been here before. Zinc is already suspicious as hell of us.”
Olivia looked as if she wanted to say something more, but I had just popped her enthusiasm balloon. Instead, she eyed her new jumpsuit suspiciously, holding it up in front of her and eyeing the fit. “How’s it feel?” She glanced at my hand. Last night, it was visibly broken and ugly, deep pools of blood in purples bordering on black made any movement a challenge. None of that was visible now.
“Little bit like I woke up new,” I replied, instinctively opening and closing my hand to test it. I wasn’t exaggerating, whatever that machine dosed us with must’ve overridden whatever effects Ann’s potions had on us, but wow, had it been worth it. I had no stiffness anywhere, my magical well felt full; even my teeth felt clean. I could’ve sworn I had a cavity when we got here.
“Like the song?”
“Like, the what?” I asked absently. “I’m just not in pain anywhere.”