by S. R. Witt
I, on the other hand, hadn’t lost anything. The money I’d stolen wasn’t charged any transaction fee, at all.
The Thief’s Bounty and the general antagonism toward thieves was starting to make sense. If I could get around the Game’s transfer costs, what other financial shenanigans could I get up to?
Bastion started gathering the coins and shoveling them into the pouch.
Without thinking, I put my hand on the pile. “What about my share?”
I’d stolen close to 300 silver pieces, but I still needed at least 200 more if I was going to pay off the Grandfather.
But Bastion wasn’t in the mood to split anything. “I need the money to get the next quest.”
“You don’t even know if there is a next quest.”
Bastion shoved my hand away, and the rest of the money disappeared into his belt pouch with lightning speed. “Once we get the next quest reward, you’ll get paid.
“Please. Don't take that money.” I begged my brother to listen to me. “We can't afford to gamble with what little money we've earned. We need to think about how we're using it.”
“That's what I'm doing,” Bastion replied. “You're so tangled up in this secret society business, you're missing the big picture.”
“And what is the big picture?” I asked, getting more peeved by the second.
“We need each other. Now more than ever.” Bastion leaned over the table and lowered his voice so no one would overhear our conversation. “Sure, the legitimate money gets shaved by the transaction fees. Sure, you make more money by taking it than most folks do by earning it the old fashioned way.
“But think about it. If you start rolling in the dough, maybe the local authorities will wonder where all that money came from. And maybe they’ll do some digging and not like what they found out about you and your sneaky little friends.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and frowned. “You’re saying I need a front to launder my ill-gotten gains?”
“Something like that,” Bastion said. “Plus, if we do get a quest from the guards, that has to help your reputation with the law.”
“Go on,” I grumbled. “You win. Take the money. Prove me wrong.”
Bastion grinned and left me alone, sulking.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Being short almost two hundred silver pieces didn’t give me the warm fuzzies. Sitting in the tavern, counting and recounting my meager funds in the hopes they’d miraculously multiply, I mulled over my options.
They were all pretty shitty.
Going back to the bazaar and robbing more player characters was too risky without Bastion along to create a distraction. I was still very low level, so my skills and attribute scores weren’t high enough to give me an edge over other players. Without the significant positive modifier for the distraction, leaving my fate up to the Random Number Generator was like playing Russian Roulette with three chambers loaded.
Robbing stores also out of the question, too. My stunt with the pawnshop had been such a major score the rest of the merchants had stepped up their security to protect themselves. The only thing giving me breathing room on this month’s bills was that lucky move early on. If I hadn’t figured out a sneaky way to make a big score so quickly, my bank balance would already be zeroed out.
But that money wasn’t going to last forever. Mom’s medical bills stacked up higher every day, and it cost a big chunk of our nest egg just to keep the lights and the Internet on. Add rent to the monthly vig, and the money I’d stolen wouldn’t last more than a few weeks.
There was enough in the bank for food, but only if we stuck with ramen, fruit cocktail cups, and tinned mystery meat. Even living that frugally left us with nothing to spare for entertainment. Dragon Web Online was the only outlet for Bastion and me, and shit like this Prove Your Loyalty quest was turning this place into a pseudo-medieval fantasy version of flipping burgers at Mickey D’s.
A tinny alarm chimed in my head, and a reminder message flashed across my vision. It was time to take my mom in for her appointment.
I tapped the Log Out icon hovering on the far right side of my vision and emerged from the virtual reality of the toasty warm tavern to all-too-real reality of my freezing bedroom. It was winter in Brooklyn, too, and it was a hell of a lot less pleasant in the World than in-Game.
The Control Interface Necklock peeled from my neck with a sticky rasp, and it left behind an even stickier residue. I snatched an alcohol wipe from the box on my nightstand, cleaned my neck, and levered myself out of the oh-so-comfy cradle of my bed. The stupid thing had burned up all the credit I had to my name, but it was the only way to spend gobs of time lying motionless without getting bedsores or coming out of VR with screaming muscle pain.
I dropped the CIN into its sleek carbon fiber case on the shelf next to my door and headed to our dingy living room to get my mother ready for her appointment.
She was awake, but only just. The combination of painkillers and the ravages of her disease left my mom weak and listless most days. It was a rare event for her to be awake and lucid for more than an hour or two, and that window was shrinking too fast for comfort. If we didn’t find some new treatment or get the cash together for better filtering equipment, it wouldn’t be long before we were keeping her body warm while her mind slipped away from us.
Those thoughts didn’t help anything. I pushed them away, a task made easier by Mom’s warm smile. I bent to meet her, and she wrapped both arms around my neck in a tight embrace. Her arms were so thin, her frame so slight, it was like being hugged by a sparrow.
I scooped one arm under her legs, and another beneath the umbilicals connected on either side of her cervical spinal column. My strength wasn’t any greater out in the World than in-Game, but my mom was so withered even I had no trouble lifting her. She folded against my chest and kissed my cheek as I helped her stand.
Her legs wobbled for a moment as she released her grip on me to grab onto the chair next to her bed.
I didn’t want to patronize my own mother, but I also didn’t want her to collapse on me. “You okay to stand up while I get you out of this thing?”
Her other arm left my neck and found the chair. She shook from the effort. “I’ll be all right, but don’t take all day.”
The machine that kept her alive was massive and reeked of lubricating oil. Its bulk was hidden beneath her bed, where it labored and wheezed day and night. Thick tubes ran from the machine up behind the head of mom’s bed to the backpack-sized control unit. Thirteen flexible umbilical tubes extended from the control unit to the ports on my mother’s head, spine, chest, and abdomen.
The control unit disconnected from the machine with a hiss as positive pressure seals blew out quick blasts of nitrogen to keep contamination out of the system.
A timer clicked to life on the top of the control unit. Red LEDs flashed: 02:00:00.
A mechanical voice droned, “Untethered operations commencing. Battery power, maximum. Estimated duration, one hundred and twenty minutes.”
We had two hours to get my mother to the doctor, through her appointment, and back home and reconnected to the machine. That’s how long the battery and portable filters in the control unit would keep my mother alive. The seconds ticked down on the counter’s display, and my pulse quickened. “Okay, mom, let’s get going.”
The control unit had straps that I flipped over my shoulders. It clung to my chest like a baby in one of those fancy polymer slings all the surrogates used. It was bulky and uncomfortable, but with it hanging from my chest I could keep an eye on the display and make sure the tubes between my mom and I weren’t snagged or tangled.
After adjusting the straps, I took my mother’s hand, and she held onto my arm for dear life. If I slipped or tripped, we’d both fall. A tumble wouldn’t hurt anything but my pride. My mom, on the other hand, would wind up very badly injured.
Her bones were brittle from years of calcium leaching into the nanites infecting her. Her skeleton would shatter in
a hundred different places the instant she hit the cold linoleum floor. If multiple fractures didn’t kill her, the umbilicals would tear loose and leave her at the mercy of the microscopic mechanical killers in her bloodstream.
She’d be dead in seconds.
I wished I was as nimble in real life as in-Game. Instead, I had to struggle with my usual clumsiness as I tried to support my mother, keep an eye on the control unit, and manage the umbilicals draped between us. We passed Karl’s room, and I peeked in to see if he could give me a hand. He should have been in-Game, bribing the Captain of the Guard to get us that quest.
But he wasn’t. His room was dark, and the bed was empty. His CIN peeked out of the case on his pillow. As usual, when it was time to sack up and help out, he was nowhere to be found.
My brother, the asshole.
The walk to the subway was nerve-wracking. Brooklyn isn’t known for its polite and accommodating population. No one watches where they’re going and shoving people who got too close to me was the only way to make it to the subway in one piece.
The train was its own fresh hell. The crowds pressing through the narrow doors didn’t care I had delicate machinery strapped to my chest and an even more fragile mom hanging off my arm. If I tried to walk us into the cars, it’d be a disaster.
Instead, I backed into the crowd and threw elbows until people got the hell out of my way. “Coming through! Sick woman, coming through!”
It’s not just that everyone’s a rude dickhead. We weren’t the only ones with places to go and people to see, and everyone was on a deadline. Gig workers were racing to get to the next job before another temp slave beat them out of their slot. Delivery people scrambled to get to restaurants before their rivals could snatch up all the food. The few lucky office workers rushed from one cubicle to the next, desperate to put in as many hours as they could to climb that corporate ladder to the promised land of seven figure salaries and Cadillac insurance policies.
The world was a race, and though we all had personal finish lines to reach, the track was crowded and the competition fierce.
My mother winced and sagged against me as the subway lurched ahead. “I need to sit.”
There were no empty seats. None of the other passengers would meet my eyes. No one was going to give up their seat for my sick mom without a fight.
I hunched over next to the handrail. “Lean against my back, mom.”
She rearranged the umbilicals, so they wouldn’t tangle and draped herself over me, letting me support her slight weight. The mechanical disease devoured her a little more every day. All because of one simple slip.
My mom had just finished a double shift cleaning massive organifactories when she’d tripped over a loose grate and rammed an injector wand into the back of her arm. In the blink of an eye, millions of microscopic machines pumped into her blood and took up permanent residence.
The industrial nanites living inside my mom were designed to clean bioengines. They chewed up any calcium or plaque they found and digested it to excrete oxygen and nitrogen. It was a miraculous process, really, and it worked great to keep the enormous refineries from choking to death on their own biological waste.
But the same process that cleaned the machines consumed my mom. It devoured her bones, damaged her blood vessels, and threatened to reduce her to a gray ooze if the filters ever gave out.
The company blamed her for the accident. The bastards even charged her for the cost of disinfecting the injector wand so the precious bioengines wouldn’t get sick from any of the viruses floating through her bloodstream. Inspectors classified the accident as negligence on my mom’s part and blamed her for working an unsafe number of hours in a day.
They took away her insurance that day. She got fired, and my family joined the ranks of the chronically underemployed floating somewhere below the poverty line. Life had pretty much sucked ever since.
“90 minutes remaining.” The mechanical alert on the control unit sounded off as soon as we entered the doctor’s office. That left hour for the appointment and thirty minutes to get back home. We could make it.
We shuffled over to the receptionist. He wore a contamination mask that covered everything except his eyes, and those were shielded by graft lenses that gleamed like bulging mirrors. “Sign in.”
He tapped the screen embedded in the desk in front of him. I lifted my mom’s medical tags from her shoulders, scanned them on the screen, then draped their corroded chain around mom’s neck.
The receptionist glanced down at the monitor below my line of sight and motioned toward the waiting room. “We’ll be with you shortly.”
I tapped the countdown timer on the control unit. “We don’t have a lot of time. The battery and filters are going to—”
He didn’t even look at us. Just flicked his hand toward the waiting room. “We’ll call your name when the doctor is ready to see you.”
“Please—”
His fingers flicked again, and the conversation was over.
The seats were filled in the waiting room, too, but my back was shot, and my mom’s legs were about to give out. I stared at a young woman reading a magazine. Only rich people bothered with paper these days, the rest of us got everything else on our phones. She was the only one that didn’t look like she needed to be at the doctor’s office. Bitch could stand. “Excuse me.”
She fussed with her long blond hair, buried her nose deeper in the magazine, and ignored me.
My mom leaned against the wall, gasping for breath. The control unit could filter her blood well enough to keep her alive, but the nanites made every second a struggle for survival. Standing up for a few minutes was enough to exhaust her. “It’s okay, baby.”
It wasn’t okay. None of this was okay.
“Excuse me.” I plucked the magazine from the blond’s hand and tossed it onto the floor.
Her blue eyes flashed at me like daggers. “That is a very expensive—”
“My mother is very sick. She needs your seat.”
Those blue eyes sparked with indignant rage. The young woman stared at the control unit on my chest and traced the drooping umbilicals to where they disappeared under my mom’s baggy clothing. Her painted lips curled into a sneer that made me want to crawl under a rock. “Fine.”
Without looking at either of us, she snatched her magazine from the floor and stood. We weren’t people to her. We were just annoyances that reminded her how much the world outside her privileged bubble sucked.
It was awkward, with my mother sitting while I stood. The filter tubes curved over her shoulders to her spine, and the others dangled down between us. To keep the lines from tangling, I faced my mother and held my arms out so they’d have something to rest on. It was exhausting work, standing like that as we waited.
And waited.
The timer ticked down, one minute after another, and still, they didn’t call her name.
“Henderson.” The mechanical voice echoed from the overhead speakers, and the blond smirked at me.
She tucked her magazine under one arm and smoothed her skirt with the palms of her smooth, manicured hands. “Hope you’re not in a hurry,” she said with a venomous smile. “This might take a while.”
My mother squeezed my hand. “We’ve got time. Don’t worry.”
But we didn’t have time. Not much, anyway. We’d spent 45 minutes in the waiting room, which cut our time down to 15 minutes to see the doctor and 30 minutes to get back home before the control unit died.
It wasn’t enough. The appointment was to calibrate the control unit and took at least half an hour. “Mom, we have to go.”
Her eyes were wide and wet with pain. The control unit didn’t do shit to manage her meds while we were out and about, she needed the big machine for that. Not because the control unit couldn’t do it, but because the law made it impossible for companies to provide portable dosing units. We wouldn’t want any drug addicts getting their fix from granny’s pain control pump, would we?
; “But I need—”
Grief and rage welled up inside me. Since the healthcare reforms a few years back, there were no private doctors. If you were ridiculously wealthy, there were concierge house call services, but otherwise, you had to come to the public providers and wait your turn with the rest of the poor. There were that could help you jump the line, which I’m sure is how Henderson made it in to see the doctor so quickly, but those were out of reach for anyone not lodged firmly in the upper upper middle class.
Which definitely wasn’t where we lived. So we waited our turn like patient little sheep, and after all that, we weren’t going to see the doctor today.
I couldn’t tear my eyes from the exam room door. At that very moment, the blond was in there, getting a prescription for acne medication while my mother flirted with death.
It was too much.
Fantasies of kicking in the door and grabbing the doctor by his skinny throat flashed through the dark corners of my mind. If we were in-Game, I’d paint the walls of this place red. None of these dicks would stand a chance against Saint.
But we weren’t in-Game. My rage became an aching knot in my throat. I couldn’t breathe.
It took me a minute to swallow the anguish. “I know, mom. I know. But we don’t have time.”
The receptionist watched us leave, a faint smirk twisting the corners of his mouth. How dare we come into his little bubble and flaunt our poverty and disease?
Something had to change. It had to.
CHAPTER EIGHT
My brother still wasn’t home when we got back from the doctor’s office, which sucked because I could have used his help getting mom settled back into bed. The umbilicals were prone to tangling and disconnecting, and it was a pain in the ass to manage them with one hand while holding mom up with the other. I got her settled into bed with a minute to spare and turned my attention to the control unit.
It ticked away the seconds in bright red numerals as I wrestled it back into its socket at the head of the bed. There were three prongs and four tubules to line up before I could click it into place.
