by S. C. Jensen
I flexed the new fingers. “Dickie, get me a mirror, would you?”
Dickie stood, frozen. He watched us with a strange, blank look on his face.
“Dickie?”
“Sorry.” He shook his head and punched a button on the wall, and I stared into the eyes of a hologram of myself. They were right; I did look like death warmed over. I twisted to see the upgrade from all angles. My stomach muscles bunched underneath the pinched folds of skin where a synthetic plate held in the guts on the left side of my body.
When I went down, HoloCity General wrote me off for parts. I didn’t have friends in high enough places to deserve the surgery necessary to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Rae paid the premium the get me while I was still fresh and signed my body out under an assumed name. She did the work to put me back together herself. Money can’t buy that kind of service. When it comes down to it, friends in low places always rated higher than cush from on high. There wasn’t much difference between Rae’s work and a pro job, unless some pencil pusher looked real close at the enhancement tickets.
“This is class equipment, Rae.” I pulled my shirt back on and shrugged on my jacket. “And it’s pink.”
Rae crossed her arms over her chest and raised her finely sculpted eyebrows at me. “And?”
Maybe I was just another project to her. Maybe she’d needed something to keep her mind off Jimi when the wound was still raw. Whatever the reason, the fact was that she brought me back from the dead. It might cost me my life to help her, but I owed it to her anyway. My resolve evaporated like fumes off a boiler car on a cold night.
“And I’ll see what I can dig up about Jimi.” I sighed. Twice in one day. I was definitely getting soft.
“Thank you, Bubbles.” Rae wrapped me in her long arms and squeezed until I saw stars dancing. “I knew I could count on you.”
“When in doubt, put your money on the pony with three legs and nothing but pride to lose.”
She released me and stood back, wiping her eyes. The blue paint stayed exactly where it was supposed to. Witchcraft. It was the only explanation.
“I’ve got to drift now, seriously.” I picked my bag back up off the floor. “If I don’t catch the four o’clock bangtail, you’ll have to go morgue diving to get your prototype back.”
“Bangtail?” Rae put her hands on her hips. “I haven’t even shown you how to use all the features yet. Where the hell—”
The office tattler pinged and a fuzzy ’gram of Chief Swain’s face hovered in the middle of the room with his jaw muscles flexing as he chewed up the words he was going to spit in my direction if I was stupid enough to take the call. I was. Maybe I was feeling a bit masochistic.
“Swain.” I grinned at him. “It’s so nice of you to call!”
He glowered at me over the ’gram. “I warned you, Marlowe. Stay off my turf. Next time I catch you sniffing around where you don’t belong—”
“You’ll what? Take my other arm? Maybe you’ll get it right and kill me properly.”
“I’m not going to kill you, girl.” Swain sneered at me with crooked yellow teeth and a cruel look twisting the flesh around his eyes. “Death would be too easy. I’m going to take everything from you. Your friends. One by one. Your business. Your sobriety… Then I’m going to watch while you kill yourself—”
The ’gram blinked off and Rae stood next to the desk, her hand on the comms button. She said, “That’s about enough of that.”
“Thanks, Rae.” I swallowed against the thick feeling in my throat and headed for the door.
Dickie stared at the place the hologram had been. “I really hate that guy.”
“Understatement of the year.” I yanked the door open and swung into the hall. “Fill her in, Dick.”
I expected Dickie to jump on the double entendre, but he stood with his arms at his sides and watched me go.
“Don’t take any more calls from the goons in grey.” I reminded him. “The scatter starts now.”
Rae’s voice followed me into the hall, carrying the sharp edge of warning. “Bubbles, if you lose that arm in space I will kill you myself.”
I hopped a slug to Harbour Station and double checked that the five hundred spot still sat in my bankroll. Why would she pay me for a job I didn’t do? The transaction lounged there like a fat house cat lording over the feral scraps of my usual contracts. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t touch the ephemeral cush, expecting it to fly out of my account as unexpectedly as it appeared. But I was going to need it. I may have won passage on the Island Dreamer, but life aboard a luxury cruiser wasn’t going to come cheap and I had to be able to blend in. Looking like a washed up pro skirt wasn’t going to cut it in the bangtail queue. I needed a class look and fast.
I browsed the shops along the Harbour Station strip on my visilens screens as the slug hummed through the underground tunnels. HoloPops screamed for my attention through the windows on the train, but the mag tracks made for a smooth ride. Most slugs I’d ridden tried to rattle you apart before you reached your destination. I guessed even the kind of clientele that deigned to take a train to the bangtails warranted the silk ride. Nice to live the cush life.
Most of the shops I pinged were way out of my league, but I found a second hand boutique with a virtual fitting room and sifted through their selection with the silence of the slug stuffing my ears like cotton. A couple of pieces looked good enough to get me on board the Dream but wouldn’t blow through the dough before I had a chance to figure out the long-run cost of a scatter in the exosphere. I put them on hold and flipped up the opalescent lenses to scan my fellow slug riders.
An old couple sat across the slug car from me, so close to one another it looked like they’d decided to save some money and share the same plastic hip. A small, practical suitcase marshalled out front of their primly squared toes. They each had a wizened grip on the handle in order to ward off thieves who might be interested in outdated tech and neatly folded clothes that smelled faintly of butterscotch and mothballs.
Next to them, co-eds dressed like high-fashion pro skirts giggled and flashed the latest in tattler upgrades at one another, posing for selfies and vlogging the experience of slumming it on the slugs. A fog of high-cush perfume—Queen of Hearts by Lorena Valentia—oozed out of their greasepaint stuffed pores. I gritted my teeth and turned my gaze to the front of the car. Even I knew that Cosmo Cosmetics had done it first and done it better with their Queen of Tarts line, and I couldn’t afford either. These fashionista numbskulls would never be able to tell the difference between vogue and vulgar unless it came with an identifying price tag. Valentia, in a typical Biz District move, mined the Grit for trends, made a pale copy of “edgy” street styles, and then charged five times the cred for comfort couture. That’s highbinder class for you.
At the front of the car, the dusty-rose robes of New Humanist acolytes stacked against each other like dominoes, filling two rows on both sides at the front of the slug. Fashion was something the members of the church didn’t bother themselves with too much. Uniform conformity to highlight the divine individuality of the human form or something like that. What were they doing on their way to the bangtail station?
The back was empty except for a Grit District bum who’d fallen asleep underneath one of the benches and missed his stop. Harbour Strip security would nab that one and give him a work-over he probably wouldn’t remember. He slept with one eye cracked open and pointed at me. I watched for a while, but he didn’t blink. Dead, maybe. Or maybe it was that tainted euphoric that had hit the streets shortly after we were forced to let Whip Tesla out on the long leash with nothing but faith that Chief Swain had ever seen the other end of it. Tropical Punch. Sometimes it gave the pinches a nice glow-up, and sometimes it blew open all their neural pathways and left them frozen in nightmares inside their own heads until their hearts forgot to keep beating. What a way to go, Jimi Ng.
I pulled down my glasses, put some white noise in the ear tubes, and let my head fall back. The lack of sleep hit back like the floor after thirteen ruby gimlets at techRose. Hard and fast. I woke when the slug slowed for Harbour Station with a crick in my neck and a damp patch on my neck where I had been drooling. I killed the white noise and nestled my glasses into my hair. The co-eds tittered across the aisle, but I refused to turn around in case it was me they were vlogging now. The last thing I needed was to go viral for beating up a younger, cuter woman with a million cred wadded up in her—
“Oh my Holy Origins,” one of them fake whispered to the others. “Are you getting this? Total system failure.”
“Where does an off-grid like that even find the juice to nerve fry?” One snapped her gum. “Getting punched is cushy. Remember when—”
A barrage of pings from their tattlers sent them into another fit of giggles as the slug slid to a stop and the doors slid open. “OMHO, are you live feeding, you vetch?”
The squad bounced out of the car in a pink cloud of candy-scented synthetics. The elderly couple stood as one, bent over the suitcase like twin lampposts, and shuffled after the gigglers. Behind me, the acolytes filed out of the front doors, silent as a grid failure. The homeless man struggled to his feet and dragged himself toward the exit with his legs lurching like dead weights from his hips. One glazed eye remained trained on me. I wondered if he had taken a punch from a cut batch of the new drug. He wouldn’t be the last.
I took the front door and left him floundering. Harbour Station security would take care of him, one way or another. I stepped directly into the path of the acolytes, who came at me like moths to a neon light. Had they been waiting for me? They stared at me with mask like expressions of neutrality.
One of them smiled like a HoloPop salesman. “Greetings, traveller. Are you embarking a journey?”
“Sorry,” I said, trying to move past them. “I don’t have time for the Purity chat right now.”
The moved around me like a pink cloud, filling in the spaces between them before I could move. The smiling one said, “The human body is an incredible thing. It’s a shame to see it adulterated so.”
“It was a plasma rifle that adulterated my body.” I pushed the smiling one out of my way. “If my prosthesis offends you, you can stop staring at it.”
They all smiled suddenly, with eerie benignity. In unison, they said, “Have a nice trip.”
I broke free of the acolytes and shook off a chill. Must be a cult. They’re all brainwashed lunatics. I blinked up at the glare of overcast skies above. This was the only slug station that let out on the surface. HS security personnel were scattered like black confetti across the harbour, and a handful of grey HCPD uniforms livened up the mix. I let my eyes float over them with calculated indifference as I scanned the strip for Hack Seconds. I pulled my hood up and jogged across the commons toward the neon haze of its windows glowing through the rain. Of course it was raining again.
At the end of the strip, the sea churned like my stomach after a bender. The only thing blue about the Sapphire Sea was the chunks of plastic floating on the surface like bits of indigestible trash in dog sick. The queues for the four o’clock bangtails already stretched out of the designated area, and late-comers were getting the water treatment on the uncovered imitation cobblestones outside the station. I left them there and ducked into the secondhand shop.
Behind the counter of Hack Seconds, the salesboy glanced up from a PornoPop holorag. He hastily flipped it closed and came around the side with his best attempt at the customer-service smile. “Welcome to Hack Seconds where you’ll find designer brands, rate seconds, and—”
A doll-like contortionist let out a wet groan from the counter top where the rag had fallen open again. The service boy leaped for it with his face the colour of boiled lobster chips.
I hit him with a glare of schoolmarm severity and pointed to the stack of clothes he’d folded and set aside for me. “Where’s the change room?”
“Back here.” He grabbed a key fob from underneath the counter where the holorag now had a box of tube upgrades sitting on top of it. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t let yourself get any funny ideas about the natural range of human flexibility and we’ll call it even.”
“Sure.” The lobster chips looked a little burnt. He opened the door for me. “I know that.”
I stepped inside and stripped out of my Gritwear. I tugged on a shiny white jumper that had star-cruise socialite written all over it. It was hideous and it suited me perfectly. The halter neck left my upgrade free to move and showed off enough of the goods to distract all but the most dedicated, het-oriented, male officers of the law. I stuffed my jacket and street clothes into the shiny silver backpack. It was so old, I figured I could get away with it as a retro style piece. My boots made an aggressive, post-futurist statement against the glam white suit. I used the mirror to tousle my pink hair the way I’d seen on a couple of the co-eds do it and applied red glitter in clean lines to my lips and eyes. I didn’t have Rae Adesina’s gravitas, but I made up for it with my own secret weapon: an implication of high-cush moral flexibility. I pinged the sale through and stuffed the purchases into the bag too.
The salesboy’s larynx bobbed a couple times when I stepped out of the change room. I grabbed a clear umbrella with an opalescent sheen to it as I walked through the door and trusted him to charge it to the same bill once his wires uncrossed. The new look had the effect I was going for. Before the door had swung closed behind me, the holorag was panting again. Maybe the umbrella would be on the house.
I tested my strut across the commons, putting as much sway into each step as I could without letting gravity win the battle against my top half. It had been a while since I’d worked any kind of juice, and I felt like a damned glam-poppet. But harbour security guards followed my movements with appreciative eyes and kept a respectful distance. There seemed to be more of the black smudges looming out of the rain, but maybe that was just me being a bit tight. Don’t second guess it, I told myself. Looking like you want to be noticed is the best way to avoid getting the kind of attention that has the black eye of a gun barrel attached to it. I eyed the queues and tried to figure which one was for “lucky winners.” I didn’t want to blow my cover by hopping the wrong line and causing a scene when the outfit says I know what I’m doing.
Acolytes of the Last Humanist Church seemed to deserve their own jump point. A thin file of damp, pink robes shuffled inside the station—many more than had been riding the slug with me. The segregation made sense enough; they wouldn’t want to expose their wholesome flesh to the nanoparticles and radio waves or whatever else they thought the rest of us were oozing into the atmosphere with our unbridled desire to foul the natural purity of our human forms. But why was the Last Humanist Church sending its purest disciples to the Island Dreamer at all? Probably there to convert the lowly technofilth when they’re on the glow-down and hit the holowall of despair.
A commotion at the slug pulled some attention away from me. I flipped down my glasses and flicked on the mirror lenses so I could watch while maintaining an air of self-absorbed indifference. The Grit scrub leaned on one of the officers, waving one arm wildly, his dead, flat eye still trained on me like one of those analog paintings in a retro-grade museum that seemed to follow you as you moved about the gallery.
An uncomfortable thought dawned on me, and I hustled my swagger toward the tail end of the shortest queue. I pulled up behind a couple techrotic bros with enough black-market gear to drain a micro trade zone’s cush roll. One eyed me obliquely with a mechanical iris and nudged his buddy with all the subtlety of a gearhead on the glow-up. A shout exploded from the scuffle of security manning the slug trail.
“Mind if I jump the line, baby?” I placed my upgrade on Bug-Eye’s shoulder. “The views even better from that angle.”
“I don’t know
.” His pal grinned at me with metal teeth. “It’s looking pretty good right now. What’s in it for us?”
Feet pounded through puddles across the commons toward me. I watched them in my mirrors but didn’t turn my head. “A smooth ride or a whole lot of pain. You decide.”
“Skip it, bro.” Bug-Eye started to turn again. “There’s vetch aplenty onboard the Dream fresher than this piece.”
An HS security office put up his hand to accept a transmission. His mouth formed the words, “We’ve got her.”
“Time’s up, sugar cube.” I punched through Bug-Eye’s back plate with my upgrade and whipped him backwards. The new hydraulics had a bit more kick than my old arm, and he flew through the air like a metal rag doll, crashing into the first wave of HS goons with the satisfying crunch of hardware failure. I turned to his pal. “I had hoped you’d pick the pain train.”
The techhead swung at me with an arm like a sledgehammer. But like most bros, he was all show and no go. I punched him in the flesh under the attachment, and he glitched like a spyware ridden HoloPop. I grabbed his twitching body and hoisted him for a shield against the grey HCPD uniforms beating toward me with their plasma rifles drawn.
“On the ground, Marlowe,” shouted the front man. “You can’t afford to lose any more body parts.”
I used my upgrade to keep my core covered with the bro’s limp braincase and backed into the queue slowly. The piece was mint and Rae’s installation rated, but my nerves screamed beneath the prosthetic as I strained past its lifting threshold. The lead officer stopped running and locked his sights in my direction. I pushed through a group of upper-crust wastrels and let them fill in the gap between me and the uniforms. Shooting into a crowd of bystanders on the Grit strip wouldn’t phase HCPD, but the Island Dreamer subset would be uglied up with lawyers before the smell of ozone cleared. Swain wouldn’t put up with that for a grid-streak minute.
