by Sean Platt
When Doc looked away with a snicker, Kai glanced toward the two disguised soldiers across the street. Both were watching them. Whitlock stared back, unabashed. There was something in Whitlock’s look that rang a bell inside her, but she stuffed the strange feeling down, turning back to her current problem.
She had to do something to break the situation open. Something disturbing.
So she gripped the front of Doc’s suit coat and planted her lips on his, pushing him back into the wall. He flinched then let it happen.
And then, finally, she knew what had to come next.
“And I thought you might be up to something funny,” said Doc. “But I guess not, because that was logical.”
“You need to come with me,” she whispered. She hadn’t let go of his lapel. She began dragging him toward the alley’s far end, away from the Starbucks entrance. Away from Whitlock and Jameson, across the street.
“You ain’t gonna lead me to Beamers, are you?” he said. But Doc was Doc, and regardless of whether he was suspicious of something or not, he was still getting hard. She could see that his pants had already started to tent following their kiss.
“Just come,” she said.
“You must say that to guys a lot,” Doc replied.
She dragged him stumbling for a few more feet then let him go and walked in front for him to follow. She let her ass do the talking, knowing Doc would watch, knowing him better than he knew himself. He would, of course, know full well that the last thing Kai would be looking to do after finding him and warning him about impending danger would be to pull him into a corner and ride his rocket, but at the same time he would be somehow hopeful that it would happen anyway. It wouldn’t matter that he seemed a little irritated — or maybe a bit more — with her, either. Since she’d known him, the brain below Doc’s belt had always been more influential than the one in his head.
“Where we goin’?” he said, trying to sound cavalier.
Kai turned to look at back, but she wasn’t looking at Doc; she was eyeing Whitlock and his partner over Doc’s shoulder. The soldiers were already scrambling at their tables, trying to extricate themselves without drawing undue attention. She couldn’t run because she knew they’d catch her if she did. But she wasn’t going to kill a man in the mouth of a public alley, and getting the soldiers to join the party was her next logical move. There had been something in that look Whitlock had given her — that chiming sense of unresolved déjà vu — that practically insisted it.
Kai didn’t answer Doc. She continue walking, facing forward, moving at a brisk but even pace. He took a few large steps with his longer legs to catch up, and soon they were walking side by side. And with that, Kai realized she was back in control. Whatever angle Doc had been trying to play a few moments ago, Kai had neutralized it. Now she was leading him around by the dick, and the only question was where it would be best to stop.
They reached the next block, where one alley intersected another. They crossed the small street, skirting a trio of homeless people. You didn’t see homeless much in the heart of District Zero anymore. Directorate poor never lived on the street, and Enterprise who failed their way into the gutter usually knew to keep out of sight, holing up under bridges and in accessible basements. These three were either crazy or too new to poverty to know better, but if they stayed where they were, it wouldn’t be long before Respero agents improved their situation in one way or another.
“Seriously,” said Doc. “Are we headed somewhere fun, or are you leading me to your bosses?”
Kai stopped, turned, and slapped Doc across the face again. Hard enough to knock him to the ground.
“Motherfucker!” she yelled.
“Motherfucker yourself, hon!” he replied.
“Do you think I set you up?”
Doc looked up at her for a long moment. “I keep running into mysterious bad guys with you, is all I know.”
“You saw me tortured!” she said, red fury in a collar around her neck. “My sense of time was a little fuzzy, but I’d say I took two or three times as much as you took before…before I came in and rescued your sorry ass.”
“You could have been faking it.”
Kai reared back and, using every carbon-nanotube-reinforced, nanobot-tuned muscle in her long, lean right leg, kicked Doc in the ribs. His body yielded too much on impact, and she decided she must have broken one or more of his ribs.
“I’m supposed to kill you, you piece of shit!” she bellowed, unable to help herself. “You put me in this position! I have to kill you, or they’ll kill us both! Do you hear me? And it’s your own stupid, stubborn, dickheaded fault, because the people who used to be saving us now see you as the giant cocksucking liability you are!”
Doc groaned then looked up. “Who are those people? Who’s pulling your pretty little strings?”
She kicked him again. “Fuck you!”
The soldiers had seen the melee start and were trotting up behind them, slinking along the alley’s side wall. Doc’s eyes went to the soldiers then back to Kai.
“Do it again,” he croaked up at her. “I like it rough.”
The soldiers reached the cross-alley, glanced at the homeless people, then slowed to a fast walk. Kai watched them approach. She glanced down at Doc, who wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon, and saw a small, grim smile grace his lips as he looked toward the overdressed soldiers. The smile just pissed Kai off even more.
Fucking Doc.
Seething, she remembered that she had to kill him. Now, while she was pissed off, was as good a time as any to do it. But then she wondered: Why exactly was she pissed off at Doc? Was it because he was being an asshole…or was it because he was being correct?
Kai stood over her prey, her legs slightly parted, her head turned back to watch the soldiers approach. Then, as they arrived, her earlier sense of déjà vu smacked her hard, and she suddenly knew why Whitlock’s look, even from a distance, had struck a strange chord within her.
“Ralph?” she said, too low to be heard.
From the corner of Kai’s enhanced eye, she saw Doc’s reaction as he watched the shocked expression cross her face. But most of her attention was focused on Soldier Whitlock — the man she’d bedded last week as the firewalled mystery man, Ralph McGuinness.
Kai watched Whitlock approach, a torrent of information hitting her like a tsunami.
She hadn’t been able to figure out who Ralph was in the end, but she knew a few things about him. She knew he’d had tickets for Natasha Ryan’s concert yet had seemed totally uninterested in Natasha’s actual performance. He’d been much more interested in scanning the crowd and looking toward the exits — almost as if he was waiting for something to happen. And then when something had happened — when the first of the big Directorate riots had erupted — Ralph/Whitlock hadn’t seemed remotely surprised. It was as if he’d been expecting it. Because of course he had been expecting the riot, seeing as he (and no doubt a well-placed a group of others) had been sent to the concert to cause it.
The riot hadn’t been started by rowdy members of the Directorate after all. The Directorate had been framed. Enterprise had staged the riot as a power play, to denigrate their opposition in advance of Shift.
Whitlock was Ralph. Ralph was Whitlock.
And Whitlock, of course, worked for Micah Ryan.
Kai almost shut her eyes to block out the secret she’d tried so hard last week to uncover. It was a very, very dangerous piece of information. Micah was an exceedingly private man. You didn’t browse Micah’s files; you didn’t rifle through Micah’s apartment or office; you sure as hell didn’t try to crack your way into Micah’s agents while he was using them for something underhanded. But luckily, there was no way Micah could possibly know she’d tried that last one, was there? It wasn’t as if Kai had used a sterile lancet to drop six scavenger nanobots into Ralph’s cortex or anything…say, six scavengers that wouldn’t have expired or been purged yet. Six little fingerprints still floating around
inside Whitlock’s head — Kai Dreyfus hallmarks that the technology Micah had at his disposal would easily be able to trace.
Kai realized she’d put herself in some deep shit, attempting to hack Soldier Whitlock. She also realized she didn’t want to know what she’d just learned and wished she had never tried to learn Ralph’s secrets.
But perhaps most importantly, she realized how she could kill Doc Stahl.
Whitlock looked at Kai, last week’s well-placed bit of mental fog still obscuring his memories of ever having met her.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“What you told me to do,” she purred, smiling and blinking her eyes. It was a rather obvious and clichéd gesture, but that didn’t matter because she wasn’t trying to seduce Whitlock or his partner. She was trying to distract them from her hands as they moved behind her back — as the fingers of her right hand thrummed a rhythm onto her left wrist.
“You’re in the middle of an alley,” said Whitlock, unimpressed.
“So?”
“What, are you going to beat him to death right here in public?”
“Kicked to death by a jilted woman seems like a pretty legit crime, from the police’s perspective,” said Kai. She took a few steps toward Whitlock, stepping like a cat. He should be close enough to smell the enhanced musk that was now churning from her pores. She inhaled, puffing her chest as she cocked her long pale neck to the side.
Whitlock’s partner watched, apparently interested. But Kai wasn’t trying to seduce either of them; she was exploiting the fact that smell was an extremely evocative sense. Right now, Whitlock’s brain should be starting to remember Kai deep down, well below the level of consciousness. Connections were forming. He’d be realizing that he genuinely liked this woman for some reason, almost as if they’d shared a bond. In a strange way, he’d trust her. He’d want to please her. And as the motion of Kai’s fingers on her arm reactivated the scavengers in his cortex, his defenses would sigh enough to let those scavengers do their work without resistance.
Whitlock’s eyes took on a dreamy appearance. The corners of his mouth started to twitch, as if with memory.
“Let’s finish this up,” he said, looking into Kai’s brown eyes.
“I’d like that.”
“End it with something quick.”
“Can I use your gun?”
“No,” said Whitlock.
She’d known that wouldn’t work, but it had been worth a shot. Not that having a gun would solve anything, she realized. She couldn’t kill the soldiers, and she couldn’t run. She had to kill Doc. That was the only way. Kai’s unfair influence over Whitlock notwithstanding, the only way out was if Micah knew that she’d done what he’d told her to do.
She lowered her voice to a whisper.
“But maybe we should be alone,” she said, glancing at the other soldier.
“Jameson,” said Whitlock, still staring at Kai but pitching his voice toward his partner. “Report back to HQ.”
Jameson looked confused. “Report what?”
Still locking eyes with Kai, Whitlock said, “Just go back.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a rookie, and I’m your superior,” Whitlock said.
“I think we’re supposed to stay together.”
Whitlock turned, his tone becoming angry. Judging by the expression on his face, his own anger seemed to surprise him. “I think you’re supposed to fucking listen!”
“You might need help bringing her back,” said Jameson.
Whitlock glared. “You idiot. She’s doing this to prove herself. You really think I’ll need to restrain her after she’s done the job?”
Knowing it was over the top, Kai whispered to Whitlock, “You might have to restrain me.”
Jameson looked confused but was already starting to turn. “What do you want me to tell them?”
“Whatever you fucking want!”
Still uncertain, the second man began walking back down the alley. Kai and Whitlock watched him go. The entire way, he kept glancing back. Then, a few minutes later, Kai heard the distant whine of a screetbike. They watched as it flew off over the low buildings.
Behind her back, Kai continued to tap on her forearm. Then, in front of Doc and Kai, Whitlock folded and collapsed.
Doc, still on the street below Kai, looked up. “What did you do to him?”
“Something you should keep in mind that I can do,” Kai snapped, still not over her anger at Doc.
Doc sat up, wincing as he gripped his side. He looked for a moment like he was going to make a joke about what Kai had done to him, but instead he looked at the slumped soldier and said nothing.
“Now we run?” he asked.
“No,” Kai said. “Now we make some memories.”
EPISODE 6
August 13, 2023 — New York
“Would you like me to get something for you while you wait?” the receptionist asked Noah West.
The girl — who was pretty and petite — looked even tinier sitting at the too-large reception desk. Behind her, the word EverCrunch was spelled out in eighteen-inch letters. The idea of the huge desk had probably been to impart visitors with a sense of awe, but all it really did was to make the receptionist look ridiculously small. Noah found himself thinking of her as Tinkerbell, expecting her to start throwing fairy dust at any moment.
Noah looked to his left, where a conference table with heavy wooden legs was stocked with a giant coffee urn and more food than seemed necessary for anything other than a marathon pit stop. He knew it was a courtesy table, complimentary for visitors, but it seemed so wasteful. How many people came into EverCrunch on a daily basis? How many of those people needed or even wanted something to eat? But that wasn’t the point, really. The point was that this was EverFuckingCrunch, and when you had as much money as EverFuckingCrunch, you could burn wads of cash to warm the foyer if you wanted.
“What kind of something do you mean?” Noah asked the Tinkerbell receptionist.
“Something to eat,” she said, smiling. “A cup of coffee?”
Noah looked at the food table, at the receptionist, then back at the courtesy table. He’d been waiting for ten minutes, and she’d pointed out the food when he’d first come in. They had even small-talked about its variety and volume.
“Other than that food and coffee?” he said, pointing.
“No,” she said. “I meant something from there.”
Noah put a perplexed look on his face. “From this table that’s right next to me?” He held up his hands. “Are you asking if you can walk around your desk, pick up something from that table, and put it into my hand?”
The receptionist giggled.
“People must really be that lazy if you’re offering,” said Noah, dropping his hands.
“You’d be surprised.”
But Noah wouldn’t be surprised at all. His father had busted his ass daily from dawn to dusk for his entire life: working land, driving tractors, repairing machinery, digging and breaking things that had to be broken. Noah had grown up under toil’s unending shadow, and all it had given him throughout high school (hell, even into college) were odd, almost pitying looks. Kids whose parents shuffled papers acted like Noah should be ashamed of his father and his chosen profession as a farmer, despite the fact that Ian West out-earned all of their parents. Most people were afraid of hard work and didn’t understand the need to reach out and take what they wanted. They expected the world to hand it over gift-wrapped instead.
“I’m unnerving you by not partaking in this banquet,” Noah said. “Let me fix the problem.”
For a second, Noah hung on the F in “fix.” It was probably thinking of his father and the ridicule in high school that did it. But he wasn’t the farmer’s kid anymore, and he no longer stuttered. He wasn’t ashamed of his past and didn’t want to hide it, but he wouldn’t be defined by it, either. A man or a woman of substance wrote their own life story, line by line, no matter how the tale was begun.
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Noah stood. Then, making a show for the receptionist, he approached the food table. The girl giggled again. Noah inspected the spread, stealing glances behind him.
The table was covered in food. Easily 90 percent of it would be stale or spoiled by sundown. Noah hoped they sent it to a homeless shelter. There were still quite a few homeless shelters in New York, no matter how uniformly wealthy and optimistic people liked to believe the world was these days. Noah saw six kinds of donuts in the spread (including some fat jelly filled ones that smelled delightful), a few varieties of danishes, various spice breads, English muffins and wheat bread for toasting (there was a toaster and some condiments near the coffee urn), blueberry muffins, and various other carbohydrate bombs. Add a reservoir filled with congealed gray sausage gravy, and it would be like the continental breakfast buffet at a Holiday Inn Express.
To one side, almost neglected, sat a bowl of fruit. Noah avoided the junk and grabbed an apple, which he polished on a napkin. Then he drew a cup of black coffee from the urn and sat, took a bite, and raised his eyebrows at the receptionist.
“Better?”
“Much,” she said.
The phone rang. The receptionist answered it, taking the call on a conventional phone with a cord. Noah found that worthy of note. EverCrunch had been built on technology — its compression algorithm that squished petabytes of data into a few megs of space without a corresponding decrease in access speed — and that technology had, through hosting fees alone, catapulted the company to the top of the Fortune list. Yet despite the astonishing things the company could do with data, the rest of EverCrunch’s world seemed abjectly unremarkable, making its facility with data appear almost random.
For one thing, the company had actual physical offices. Few companies bothered to co-locate anymore, because of the expense and the way it limited the talent pool to the immediate geographic area. For another, EverCrunch used phones that ran on the unreliable fiber network. Sure, they were only using voice, but the company had Internet anyway, right? So why not tie Internet and phone together and cut the cord? Was it possible the building’s Internet ran on fiber? Of course not; it’d be G10 AirFi. So then why not use cellular phones instead of corded phones — or better, something like Talkie that used the G10 directly? The oddities were all small things, but they struck Noah as almost troubling. If the company couldn’t see around something so obvious (who still used corded phones?), did that explain why they couldn’t see how EverCrunch compression could tag-team with the Internet and shift the nature of information forever? What other blind spots were in EverCrunch’s way? It made Noah wonder if Ben Stone was actually as brilliant as the press said or if he was just a savant — a man with a beautiful mind for numbers but who didn’t know when his shoes were untied.
