Into Neon

by Matthew A Goodwin

“Good,” he said. “Could be a long da—” he began and cut his words short, pressing a finger to his ear. Rosetta turned from the streams of data on her screens and Judy cocked an ear. “Getting this?” Burn asked Rosetta, who nodded, causing all the piercings in her head to bounce.

  “What is it?” Moss whispered, but the cots above him were already beginning to shift.

  “Burn, you want me to piece him or unlock him?” Rosetta asked, holding up a physical earpiece.

  “Just unlock him, the thing’s in there already,” Burn answered, pointing at Moss and indicating for him to move. He stood and hustled over to Rosetta, making sure to avoid all the cables between them.

  “I’m gonna connect with your implant,” Rosetta said. Her tone was still kind, but tired.

  “Sure,” Moss said. “Long night?”

  She smirked. “Yeah, ThutoCo usually doesn’t make it too hard but this chip you brought is some deep data. It’ll be a while before I get anywhere. This implant on the other hand,” she said and pointed to the base of his head. He noticed then the cybernetic fingertips under a layer of the same skin mesh which were used in Relief Aides. She tapped on her keyboard. Moss watched as she got a lock to his implant.

  “How much can they do?” he asked, marveling at the ease with which they kept hacking it.

  “A lot,” she answered easily, not paying much attention to him. The screen flashed.

  DOWNLOAD COMPLETE.

  UPLOAD COMPLETE.

  INSTALLATION COMPLETE.

  “DETRITUS SIXTEEN” LINK ESTABLISHED.

  DIAGNOSTICS COMPLETE.

  “Hey, new guy.” Moss heard the Australian accented voice in his mind.

  “Hi,” he said aloud, causing chuckles all around.

  “You can think responses, just like the commands to your room back home,” Rosetta clarified.

  Oh, he thought, and Rosetta shot him a thumbs-up.

  “You can all hear my thoughts now?” He asked but realized the answer as the words left his lips. Rosetta chuckled.

  “No, just the ones designated for us. The implant translates your brainwaves the same way as before, you just have a new feature unlocked.”

  “Right,” Moss said and turned to Grimy. “How’s Gibbs?”

  “Still recovering well,” he answered.

  “Now that I have all of you,” Seti interrupted. “I got an encoded message from Ynna. It came in garbled and I won’t bother playing it for you. Suffice it to say, I heard the word captured and she hasn’t checked in since.” No one spoke as everyone processed the information. “Am I to assume you are all making grim faces at each other?” Seti broke the silence with a joke.

  “Yes,” Burn said. “We will work on a plan to get her out.”

  Seti said, “I’ll let you know if I hear anything else.”

  “Thanks,” Rosetta replied.

  “Moss,” Burn said, and all eyes turned to him. “Where would someone be taken if they were arrested in the burb?”

  “Carcer Corp has an auxiliary holding between the burbs where our security officers take people for transfer,” Moss answered, happy Issy had explained procedures in excruciating detail while she was at BurbSec Academy.

  “Think we can get in easily?” Burn asked and Moss shook his head.

  “I have no idea,” he admitted. “I guess if anyone can, it would probably be you guys.”

  “Us guys,” Stan clarified, looking right at Moss, who could feel his hand begin to shake.

  “Seti, can you get us schematics?” Judy asked.

  “Already on it,” Seti answered and a projection of the facility appeared in the center of the room, a perfect, full-color digital rendering. Flanked by burbs on all sides, the octagonal structure of gray metal and concrete was ominous. Brick walls with barbed wire lay only a few meters before chain-link fences. A guard tower overlooked the structure with floodlights and scanners. Drones circled like vultures overhead and Moss squinted to see two guards in their intimidating gray and red armor playing on palmscreens.

  “Is this live?” Moss gasped.

  “Sure is,” Seti said in an unapologetically braggadocios tone.

  “Stan, I want you to get some equipment with Moss while Judy and I workshop a plan,” Burn announced.

  “Got it, coach,” Stan said with a wry smile as everyone began to move about the room.

  “Actually,” Moss said, and everyone stopped dead. All eyes on him once more, he swallowed and said, “I think I know someone who can help us with this.”

  Judy scowled as Burn asked, “who’s that?”

  “My friend, well, one of my closest friends. I mean we grew up together, not that we were close in any other way. Not that I would be opposed to that. I just mean a friend of mine. I should clarify her parents helped raise me after mine… well, anyway, she works in security and may be able to help us,” he stammered.

  “What did you have in mind?” Burn asked.

  “Why are you humoring this?” Judy hissed. “We don’t need another fucking bub involved, we already have this bonus sack of potatoes.” Judy hooked a thumb at Gibbs. “We don’t need more. Every ThutoCo employee we bring in puts us at higher risk.”

  “That may be, but we are up against it and an inside man may be just what we need,” Burn stated and though Judy seemed to sulk, no more was said. Silence oppressed the room.

  “I was thinking she could take some of you guys prisoner or something and you could break Ynna out from the inside,” Moss offered, thinking himself very clever until the laughter began.

  Burn was not laughing. “It’s a good idea, kid.” His patronizing tone was not lost on Moss. “But that only works in the movies. If we got taken in, we would be stripped, databased, have our weapons taken, our implants shut off and would be in as bad a spot as Ynna.”

  Judy piled on. “Your plan just means more of us imprisoned.”

  “Sorry.” Moss hung his head in shame.

  “Don’t be,” Burn said. “I’ll want you to contact your friend and see if they can’t help us out, just not in the way you suggested.”

  “The way you coddle him is amazing.” Judy snorted, reminding Moss much more of the night before than the person he woke up to.

  “The only one getting coddled right now is you,” Burn said with a threatening finger pointed square at Judy. “I know you’re all bent out of shape cuz your friend’s in peril, but you need to inflict this attitude on Carcer and not those fixing to help.”

  “Fine,” Judy conceded accompanied by a dramatic eye roll.

  “Stan, take him to a café and to get kitted. Make contact with the friend if you can but keep him safe. Get back by sundown because we want to get to Ynna before they transfer her to a proper facility and things get a whole lot worse.”

  “I got you,” Stan said and headed for the door with Moss dogging his steps. He was relieved to be leaving the room, though it put him ill at ease to leave Gibbs with strangers, no matter how well they knew his family. Gibbs was a brother Moss never had and more and more his family were people he never knew. The crotchety old grandmother who sent him a present once a year for his birthday was some rebel leader bringing young people together for a cause. His father who got home just in time to say good night was some corporate spy trying to take down the company which raised him. He still didn’t even know his mother’s role in all this, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  Gibbs had been there for him. Had been a friend when he needed one most. Issy and her family had taken him in, helped him to sort his life out when things were most dire. Moss shook his head, trying to banish the guilt from his mind. One of his friends had been shot for him and he was about to ask the other to betray the people she most trusted for some person Moss hardly knew.

  “What am I doing?” he heard himself ask aloud when he and Stan were out in the anteroom. He hoped Stan had not heard but he turned to face Moss.

  “You’re doing good in a bad world,” he put plainly. “I can’t imagine what this is l
ike for you—waking up to a normal world one day and an upside down one the next. Must be hard. Brutal. But you seem like a good man and you’re going to help people. We don’t know what’s on that chip, but your dad wanted us to get it out. That means it’s some bad stuff. And you’re helping with that. You’re making your dad proud,” he said with such genuine kindness that Moss wanted to fall to the floor.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “And your friend’s gonna be all right and he’ll help too,” Stan added for good measure. “And look, before we head out, sorry about Judy.”

  “It’s okay,” Moss said halfheartedly.

  “It isn’t, and Judy knows it isn’t. What you have to understand is that it’s been a tough road. Sometimes all the talk of a post-gender world is just that: talk. Judy has never once been handed anything or been treated fair. Technology the way it is, we can all be more than human. We are born more than human. Concocted and altered in a lab. Born with nanotech, implants and altered. You can buy yourself into whatever you want to be. But if your heart knows you weren’t born the way you need, some assholes have a problem.”

  “It’s not only gender though,” Moss pointed out. “I’m sure you know better than anyone that some people have a problem with the tech, too.”

  Stan nodded. “Got that right. I may not want to alter my body, but I don’t judge those that do. Those pristiners, like my parents, railing against science? It’s all just fear,” he concluded. Moss nodded his understanding.

  “As someone who doesn’t do it, you must have some reservations about the human modifications though?” Moss asked and a corner of Stan’s lip curled up.

  “My relationship with it is complicated, sure, but I can separate my feelings about what I want for myself from those which others want for themselves. Not that it doesn’t go the other way, too. Many who meet me think I must have a problem with them simply because I don’t want the tech for myself. It’s a vicious cycle, man.”

  Listening to Stan, Moss knew that he had so much to learn about the world. His world, where neural implants were a prerequisite for employment, was so different from what Stan and Judy saw outside the burbs.

  “But with Judy, sometimes that anger at an unfair world comes out in ways it shouldn’t. Doesn’t make it right. But hopefully, it helps you to understand,” Stan said.

  “It does,” Moss said, still feeling sorrier for himself than caring about anyone else.

  “Let’s get you some new toys and talk to this girl that’s got you all out of sorts.” Stan smirked as he turned to lead Moss from the room.

  Moss felt the blood rush to his face despite himself. “It’s just—” he began but decided to let the issue drop.

  They exited the tenement building onto a bustling street, mobbed with people on the sidewalks, cars in the street and overhead. The rain was replaced by a thick gray fog hanging in the sky, dulling the colors to a pale hue. Stan had thrown a purple hoodie with the words Miners FC emblazoned on the back over his mesh shirt with a cap to match.

  “This way,” Stan said as he began moving through the people who Moss now realized were all moving toward a train station at the end of the block—an imposing, artistic spiraled glass building with a towering adjoining parking structure. Train times and directions were displayed on screens facing out toward the street, the helpful information intermittently replaced with commercials for new model cars, drudge personal assistants, and quick travel to other cities. Moss watched, expecting frustration from travelers when the information they required yielded to commercials, but he saw only conceit.

  The people moved wordless past them, staring at their palms or lenscreens, lost in earpieces or direct neural messaging. Moss followed beyond banks of storefronts for several blocks before they stopped in front of an antique bookshop with paper books in the window. Fire danced from a gas metal base above the door with the words “Fahrenheit 415” written in scorched, bent rebar before the flames.

  “Four one five is the old-time area code for this district. Clever, eh?” Stan asked.

  “Yeah,” Moss agreed as the guilt returned, knowing that Gibbs would have loved it. A bell chimed as they stepped through the door and an ancient woman looked up from the book she read with latex-gloved hands. They were surrounded on all sides by bookcases and the walls were lined with tattered pages.

  “Stanley,” the woman greeted.

  “Chu,” he said back, and she smiled, wrinkling her round face.

  “I presume you are not here for literary pursuits?” she asked as she shuffled from her chair with the aid of an ornate wooden cane carved to look like a Chinese dragon, the open mouth flattening into a surface for the palm of her hand. She wore a simple brown cloak which hung down to wooden shoes, strapped across her feet.

  “Can’t say that we are,” Stan told her.

  “To the back then,” Chu said as she moved slowly to a pristine copy of The Price of a Life in a glass case. Moss recognized the book as it was the first in the series which inspired the founder of ThutoCo to name his company for the fantasy Empire in which the story took place. Chu produced a remote and key from the folds of the cloak and pressed a large button, shuttering the windows to the outside world before she opened the case with the small key. The room now lit by nothing more than a small gas lamp on the desk at which she had been sitting, she fumbled behind the book before pressing another button. A click could be heard from the wall behind and Chu moved over to push hard on a bookcase which slid a few meters backward.

  “Any rooms in this city not have hidden compartments?” Moss joked.

  “Not in the circles we run in.” Stan smiled. “Ready?”

  “Yes,” Moss said and followed him around the bookshelf to a room padded with noise insulation foam and broad counters on either side. A young man looked up from the pornography he was watching on an old screen and waved a hand of greeting to Stan. The man had short horns protruding from his head. It was like nothing Moss had ever seen, the slight bone points sticking through the skin. He knew the vanity bioaugments were common, but he had never seen them before in real life. ThutoCo had strict policies and any augmentations had to increase productivity or were now allowed. Moss also knew these types of things to be very expensive and if this kid had them, he had to be wealthy.

  Chu peeked from around the corner and yelled at him in a language Moss took to be a Chinese dialect. The horned kid yelled back and waved her away as the bookshelf slid back into place, securing them in the tight corridor room. Moss couldn’t help but watch as ejaculate exploded onto a woman’s face on the screen and the young man turned fully around to face them, one hand concealed under the counter.

  “You always come at the worst time,” he accused Stan.

  “If this is how you work, I doubt there is ever a good time,” Stan shot back.

  “Got a problem with how I work, maybe you buy illegal guns somewhere else,” he said in a tone which Moss could not discern. Stan held his hands up, conciliatorily as a new scene began on the screen.

  “You got the best shit, jack off whenever you want,” Stan said in a similarly uncomfortable way. “We just want to get the kid here some gear.”

  “What you have in mind?” the man asked as he stood to reveal he wore nothing more than a long, stained shirt hanging down to mid-thigh with a noticeable protrusion at the front. There was another protrusion in the back: the kid had a long slender tail of flesh which swayed and flicked as he walked. Moss grimaced and, for a brief moment, just wanted to be back in his hex talking to MOSS II.

  “Something easy,” Stan said.

  “Bullets, laser, icer, plasma, sonic, needle, line, beam, eddi, phaser, saucer?”

  Stan rolled his eyes and laughed. “Those last two were made up!”

  “Caught me. Serious, what you want?”

  “Kingfisher Dual-Blast Flip,” Stan said, and the man peered under the long metal counter before reaching under and producing the pistol, setting it heavily on the counter with a cla
ng which died in the walls. Gray metal and plastic with the trademark long-billed bird logo along its face. Battery magazine loaded into the base of the grip. A slender metal switch lay atop the pistol’s trigger.

  “You point, you squeeze,” the man said to Moss as he handed a box of batteries to Stan. “Flip down, you toast.”

  “We can try it in the back?” Stan asked.

  “Sure. You want a pig?”

  Stan shook the question off, “No need to waste. Dummy’s fine.”

  The young man stepped from the counter, his shirt bunched in his crack as he opened another door at the rear of the room. He waved them in and closed the door behind them. Moss and Stan stood in the tight space and Stan handed over the weapon. It was much heavier than what they had taken from the burbs. The room was similarly insulated, with a wood table at the front facing a figure which was once made to look like a person, but which was shredded down to the pole set into the cement floor.

  “Point and squeeze,” Stan repeated, and Moss lifted the weapon, remembering the biker’s convulsions the last time he had pointed a gun.

  He inadvertently closed his eyes as he pulled back on the trigger. He smelled the white smoke which spat from the barrel just as an explosion of electricity blasted the blackened wall behind the dummy. The minimal recoil startled Moss and Stan let out a light chuckle. “All right, you have a few things to learn.”

  He helped Moss with posture, showed him how to hold his arms, square his shoulders and, “most importantly, to keep those eyes open.” They spent the better part of an hour practicing before Stan finally had Moss flip the switch.

  “Doing this will mean more kick for you but more stopping power, too. It’ll make short work of a drudge and even shorter work of a person. You follow?”

  “Yeah,” Moss said. “But I don’t want to make ‘short work’ of a person.”

  “I know you don’t, but you may have to,” Stan soothed.

  “These Carcer Corp people, they’re just people, too. They took a job and probably have families and kids and stuff and I’m sure I can’t kill them just for taking an ‘evil’ job.”

  “That’s a fair point, but you’ll feel different when they got a barrel pointed at you,” Stan said, his voice hard and unyielding.