“I found out about this artifact from Joey and―”
“That emo guy?” Alyssa cut him off, her mood shifting to amusement.
He found a smile. “He’s not emo, he’s from Mars.”
“And the difference is?”
“Okay, fine. That emo guy. He found out about an old gun that’s worth a ton of credits. I had to put together a trip real fast before someone else got to it. I remember the way you moped for days the last time I left you with the Rodríguezes. Since you made such a big deal about being fourteen, I figured I’d trust you to take care of yourself for a few days this time.”
Alyssa bunched her shirt in her fingers. Twice she started to speak, and twice she closed her mouth. His wife made the same face whenever something scared her and she did not want to admit it. “It was kinda scary being alone. Next time you go out there can I come with you?” Her eyes brightened at the thought.
Kenny babbled for a moment before his panic wore off. On one level, he felt joy that she still had interest in his hobby, but it worried him too. “I umm. I don’t know about that, hon. It’s dangerous out there. If anything happened―”
“Gangers could attack me here when you’re gone. At least out there we’d be together.” She cuddled into his side and wrapped her arms around him. “I thought people were trying to break in the other night. I freaked.”
“What?” He held her close. “Did you call the police?”
“No, I just hid in the crawlspace with my gun. Slept there.” She braced for a scolding. “No one got in, maybe I just heard stuff. So can I go next time?”
Kenny figured the payoff from this run would let him wait a few years. “I’ll think about it.”
“Get some sleep.” He gave her a kiss on the forehead and stood up. “I promise, I’ll tell you about everything from now on.”
“Kay.” She scooted back onto the bed. He pulled the comforter over her and killed the light. As he turned to walk out, she sat up. “Dad?”
He turned. “Hmm?”
“I’m sorry for being a pain in your ass since… You know…” She moped at the shape of her legs in the pink bedding.
Kenny nodded. She had never once spoken the word divorce. “Forgiven; don’t waste any more time thinking about it. I never stopped loving your mother, your real mother.” He walked to the door, leaning against it for a few minutes while he stared at his hat; the sigh of many regrets fell upon it.
“I think this worked better when I was six.”
Kenny glanced back to find her in her underwear, cowboy boots, and a tiny pink cowboy hat. She posed with a toy gun in each hand, recreating the scene from the holo picture he always took out to embarrass her.
He burst out laughing, making her blush. “Yeah, it did. Course, now I gotta shoot anyone that sees you like that.”
Alyssa ran to his arms; they both cried.
“I’m glad I got my little girl back.”
t had been weeks since the throttle on Joey’s bike had been as far forward as it was on his way to meet his friend. The wind filled his hair as he flew down The Highway, weaving between other vehicles so much slower they seemed to stand still. Knowing one errant bump could transform his vehicle into an airborne suspension of loose unaffiliated parts only added to the thrill.
He shot down the longest contiguous road in all of the UCF territory, the best excuse he had to push the bike that hard. The Highway was twenty stories off the ground, supported by a series of towers and nearby buildings, through which it tunneled. Three lanes in both directions carried traffic relentlessly at all hours of the day; there wasn’t even a rush hour: it was always rush hour. Starting five miles from the south edge, the Highway traversed West City all the way the coast and into what used to be Canada.
As the bike entered a hollowed-out space where the road passed right through the center of an apartment building, he let out a wild howl as the air currents buffeted his face. The adrenaline rush of going this fast proved uncontainable. Without the need to touch the ground, civilian hovercars and hoverbikes could go far faster, though they had the benefit of early warning sensors and crash avoidance systems.
Joey looked forward to teasing Masaru. The son of the CEO of Kurotai Electronics International refused to go to the part of town where the Fu Sheng House was located. Masaru insisted on meeting at his usual lurking spot, the Toko Lounge. This was the kind of establishment where attendance added people to Joey’s list of contemptible individuals. The wealthy exclusivity of it reminded him of his sister’s attitude. At least Masaru offered to treat; Joey could not have even afforded the air inside the place.
He tried to slow down. The entire bike shuddered from imperfections in the braking surface, sending the rear wheel into a wobble. A stream of obscenities left his mouth, lost in the ambient noise of driving. Something clattered to the road behind him, making him expect the bike would come apart in the midst of its tail-wagging dance. For the shortest of moments, he regretted not wearing a helmet.
His eyes bounced between the approaching exit he wanted and the non-working speedometer. He knew he could not slow the heavy thing down in time to take the curve in the proper way. Throwing himself as hard as he could into the bike, he held on, hitting the exit tube like a bullet into a pipe. The vast night sky vanished in an instant, replaced with the pale yellow green of vitamin-sapping lamps.
The bike slid along the outer wall, speed pinning him to the surface as he dodged various mechanical protrusions. He feathered the brakes in the hope that he might at least leave an identifiable body when he stopped moving. Just as he reached the end of the downward corkscrew, he found control. He hit the street hard, tires squealing in protest as the shocks crushed all the way down to the frame. The impact smashed his tailbone into the seat and sent a wave of force up his spine into his skull that reawakened his hangover migraine with all the subtlety of an interplanetary shuttle launch.
Joey lay limp over the handlebars as his bike rolled to a gradual halt a few blocks later. In Sector 214, he found himself in a hoity-toity area filled with bright lights and expensive cars. Mesmerized, he stared at the tendril of drool that lowered itself toward the lack of his reflection in the front tire-guard, metal that ages ago ceased being shiny. Moments later, nausea faded away, replaced by the fatigue that fills the void left after a massive adrenaline rush. He moaned in protest as he forced himself to sit up, stretched, yawned, and sat for another minute, motionless. A sea of holographic signs and advert bots painted the air around him in headache as he drove the last quarter mile.
His destination capped the tip of a dead end street in the form of a U-shaped building, a gleaming wall of light, glass, and polished steel three stories tall. The ground floor held an exclusive Japanese restaurant patronized as much for the status of being seen there as for the quality of its food.
The words “Toko Lounge” glimmered above, ten-foot tall holographic kanji painted into space by a giant unseen brush. Rows of perfect horizontal blue lines glinted behind them, surrounded by a red-orange border. After lingering for a moment, they morphed into English letters and faded away only to begin the cycle anew.
The top floor had some kind of lounge for the elite; Joey had heard all manner of rumors about it: everything from secret meetings of the illuminati to only allowing entry to pureblood Japanese. Other whispers hinted at Yakuza connections, shady dealings in drugs, military grade cyberware, and forced prostitution. It made him wonder about Masaru. If he were as pristine as he claimed, why would he want to be associated with a place shrouded in rumors of that nature? A debate began in his mind on the finer points of what he could do with the information if he could get proof; and how dangerous it would be to find out.
A small line formed by the door. People in fancy clothing waited just to get inside to wait some more. Two servers made their way along, selling drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Joey lifted an eyebrow at seeing actual people and not dolls. The idea of the patrons viewing the poor as little more than machines
made him scowl. The derelict bike came in along the curb, and he turned his head to leer at an Asian woman. A glittering dark purple gown wrapped her twig thin body, circling her neck before it attempted to cover her front, and turned into one of the smallest miniskirts he’d ever seen. He slowed as he waited for her to shift enough for the dress to give him a show. His quite indiscreet stare caused her to shoot him a disgusted look.
“Don’t act like that. You wouldn’t wear that if you didn’t love it!” Joey’s yell caused an offended gasp to sweep through the crowd, and made her blush. He basked in their derision like a rock star showing up for a concert.
He blew a kiss at her and walked the bike forward beneath the stares of the crowd. He stopped with a boot to the curb; the six buckles on the side gleamed in the blue-orange glow of the ethereal kanji.
A patronizing glare went to the valet, rigid behind the podium that separated him from someone of Joey’s social strata. The man made a face as if he could not fathom what in the world Joey was doing here. Grinning, Joey fiddled with his NetMini one handed. After a moment, Masaru’s hologram head appeared.
“Yes?”
“You inside yet?”
“Yes. We’re at a table already.” Masaru half sighed his words.
“Excuse me. I believe you made a wrong turn. CyberBurger is about two miles that way.” The Valet pointed while trying to put on an air of superiority.
Joey took a deep breath. “Lay off the accent, minimum wage boy. Don’t think for a second I don’t know you’re getting about twenty credits an hour to step and fetch it out here.”
A murmur swept through the crowd, interspersed with one or two chuckles. The Valet’s mouth hung open as if slapped.
“I’m with Masaru Kurotai; he’s already inside waiting for me. Be a dear and try not to scratch her.” Joey patted the bike on the fender. His dismount caused a small piece of metal to roll away down the street.
He walked towards the door, leaving the man to look back and forth between him and the bike as if Joey had just suggested he park a turd. In a frantic attempt to avoid touching it, he put a finger to his ear and called inside with an implant. By the time Joey reached the door attendant, the Valet was near the point of tears as his manager confirmed his story.
He tried to push the bike along without sitting on it, but succeeded only in working up a sweat and treating the crowd to a series of humorous faces. Joey took no small amount of delight in the nauseated faces the valet made as he lowered his weight onto the bike and eased it up the ramp into the parking deck.
The security man by the door loomed, wanting any excuse in the world to throw Joey to the pavement and pound him, but opened the door with a gritted smile. Joey paused a moment to offer his elbow to that girl in the purple dress, earning only a deeper glare.
A pale hardwood floor greeted him inside, filling an area sectioned off with faux rice paper walls. Chōchin hung here and there, decorated with various ideograms. In the dining area, soft cushions surrounded numerous low oval tables. The staff dressed in Japanese attire, a faithful recreation of clothing from a time before firearms.
Masaru’s formal suit closed in a diagonal across his chest, where a small silver pin about the size of a thumbnail in the shape of the Kurotai logo held it closed at his shoulder. The shiny material hinted at indigo in places where the light hit it just right, and each of his sleeves had three black buttons with a single Kanji carved out of them.
Completing his outfit, a young red-haired woman clung to his left arm. She did not even look twenty yet, and wore a gleaming green Chinese tunic and darker gloves that went up to the middle of her biceps, with dragons embroidered in darker green threading. Her boots were the same shade as the gloves, and stopped just past the knee. She could have been a model, and stared with adoring blue eyes at him.
“Is that Wednesday?” Joey poked a finger in her direction as he fell into the cushions.
The redhead gave him a confused look as Masaru shot him a stalling glare. “This is Kate. Kate, this is Joseph, an associate of mine.”
She smiled at him as he sat. “Hi.”
Joey returned the smile. “He must like you; he didn’t let Tuesday speak.”
Masaru sighed. “Pay him no mind, dear. He has no social graces.”
Katya held herself at an angle, more kneeling than sitting. She had made the mistake of wearing a sheer white dress that hugged her lithe body like a layer of paint. The hem was so short it left her in a constant battle to preserve her modesty. Her high European cheekbones sparkled with a touch of makeup that contained silver glitter, and she had put her raven hair up in a whorl behind her head, held in place by a pair of red sticks.
She smirked at Joey; the deep red color on her lips would have taken his mind off the imminent job if not for how little he trusted being alone with her. All he could find out about her indicated she had been in Russia at some point within the past few years and had some cyberware installed at the shop of their mutual acquaintance, Hiroto Ido. The ‘ware she got was the kind that that spies and assassins used, and she probably had poison lurking in places Joey cared not to think about. She slid away from her abandoned high heels to make room for Joey.
“You have something against chairs, don’t you?” Joey shifted on the cushions, sitting cross-legged with his elbows on his knees.
“No more so than you have a problem with civilization.” Masaru could have been trying to sound condescending, but it was hard to tell apart from his normal tone.
A spread of several square ceramic plates, some hovering, with various assortments of sushi, occupied the table. Joey took one piece at random, figuring he would get right to business this time.
He soon found out he had plucked a piece of salmon from Masaru’s personal order, one with an excessive amount of wasabi concealed between the fish and the rice. He gasped and pounded his fist into his chest before grabbing for the closest glass of water and draining it in a single gulp.
“Try that plate.” Masaru pointed.
Katya turned her head to look away, doing as much as she could to radiate to the room that she had no idea who this fool was. Once he recovered the ability to breathe, he pulled his deck across his lap as a tray.
“Alex gave me a good one; I’m going to need both of you. I need to get some data from a secure location. The problem is that this secure location doesn’t have a GlobeNet interlink. This is going to be easy and difficult at the same time. Difficult to get to the network, but it’ll be easy once I do.”
Neither of his friends knew a tremendous amount about the GlobeNet, but had enough familiarity to understand he would need to enter the building in the real world and find a terminal to log in.
“What’s in this file?” Masaru asked, taking a piece of his supercharged fish.
“Don’t know, don’t care.” Joey smiled.
Katya frowned, speaking with an air of sanctimony that only the beautiful could get away with. “That caused trouble for you on Mars, did it not?”
“Don’t go there.” Joey waved her off. “The Mars thing… I never actually got to the file. I still don’t know what was in it.”
Katya made a mocking face, as if Joey had just proved her point.
“Look. Mars was my fault for not checking the network out ahead of time. It had nothing to do with what the file contained. This time I know what to expect. It is a sec level 4 grid isolated from the main hotel network. They use it for sensitive data storage, both for the hotel and guests. The only way in is from local access terminals. The data node itself is just a level 5, probably running on a Simmons core.”
“Didn’t a level 5 node burn out your deck last month?” Masaru wore a fake smile.
“No, bad luck burned out my deck… not to mention a big damn troll.” Joey rubbed his M3 plug. “Technically, it wasn’t the node; it was a program construct inside it. Look, I’m not askin’ you guys to get shot for me this time, just help me get inside the place and cover me while I work. If it goes south
, you can act like you aren’t part of it.
“Okay,” said Katya without hesitation.
Masaru mulled the situation over as a piece of yellowtail swam through his teeth. Joey could not offer much in terms of money, but he had a feeling his friend would enjoy the practice.
Masaru took a sip of sake. “When does this need to happen?”
Joey glanced at his NetMini. “Today or tomorrow. The file is gonna get moved or wiped in a day or two. I checked the floor plan in the city archives―it looks like there is a maintenance office off the main lobby that leads to the secure server room. I bet there is a terminal in there that I can use.”
Without warning, loud music erupted from Joey’s deck; the kind of music that the clientele of the Toko Lounge would consider noise, and be quite offended by the lyrics if they could make them out. Joey spit his second attempt at a piece of sushi across the table into the redhead’s drink and Katya almost jumped out of her dress. The deck bounced to the ground as Joey fell over backwards, flailing. Masaru furrowed his brow. Kate covered her mouth to stifle a startled gasp, and then covered her ears to drown out the sound.
Every eye in the room was on them.
Within ten seconds, the sound cut out, leaving the room silent.
“Bitch.” Joey growled through clenched teeth.
He wobbled once more into a sitting position and pulled the deck in his lap.
Katya glared.
He smirked. “Not you. Cleopatra.”
“Is she mad at you for not paying?” Her condescending smile blurred through a glass of sake, swirled in preparation for a sip.
“From the look of that dress, you must be working tonight.” Joey grinned. “Good thing you shave the beast or it wouldn’t be long enough.”
Masaru failed to stifle a chuckle at the unexpected crass remark. Kate blushed at the floor. Katya ceased swirling the sake and fixed him with a glare, the kind of glare that once again convinced him never to fall asleep without a locked door between them. Attempting to appear nonchalant, she tried to pull it down a bit more.
Virtual Immortality Page 14
