“You’ve got your name engraved on a desk I’m peeing in, so I think we really…” I was mostly done. Last few squirts. Oh that’s good. “I think we really shouldn’t point fingers.” I zipped my pants up.
“You know what? I’m done with this whole thing.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
I pointed my laser finger at Jericho and he threw his hands up immediately.
“Whoa, whoa. You’ll never make it out of here if you… do… whatever that thing can do. Understand me. I’m done.”
“Done?” Marine came to her feet as she asked.
“Done. That’s the real box with Hakua in it. We’ve already pulled the data off of it. A copy. And we honestly have no use for you or your robot brain or your disgusting desk-pissing boyfriend.”
I played bashful. “I mean, we’re not officially—”
“Shut up. I don’t care. Just… just get the fuck out of here. Take your shit with you.”
I looked at Marine. “Does he mean me?”
“Go!”
Marine took a step away from her laptop toward Jericho.
“Don’t ever steal from me again, Jericho.”
He sneered. “You’ve got nothing else we want.”
She sneered back and turned toward the door, stopping to pick up the laptop. “Come on, Laze.”
And so we left.
Chapter
EIGHTEEN
Unbefitting a person who has his name engraved in his desk like a fucking toddler, Jericho actually wasn’t lying. We got on the elevator, it went to the lobby and not the special torture lab and when we got out, there were no guards waiting for us and the cameras didn’t conspicuously turn as we walked. Marine was quiet, mostly just holding the box in her arms, looking down at it occasionally and checking the ports to make sure they hadn’t been tampered with.
We left entirely without ceremony and started walking back toward Marine’s shop. It was a long walk but the overnight busses were awful and they only ran every hour or so in the direction we were going. My legs hurt still, but that seemed like not the sort of thing she wanted to hear.
Passing by the courtyard was good for a laugh. There were maybe a dozen melted plastic pole arms and some bushes that were a couple yards away had a nice brown-to-green gradient. The sidewalk was covered with collapsed foam that’d been used as a heat shield from the looks of the placement. Or a massive wall of hot air had kept the sprayers from getting the stuff onto the blotto box. Screens on the high rises around us were showing the news already. “Mysterious blackout at Vircore Building.” The Earle was probably balls deep in some teenage runaway by way of a celebration.
At some point my legs stopped really feeling the ache, which was welcome, but also made me concerned that I was going to die or that I had a blood clot.
“What does thrombosis feel like?”
“I don’t really have blood so…”
She seemed out of it, but there was that concern that she didn’t really want to talk. I guess she could just tell me if that was the case.
“So we got your box back.”
“Yeah…” She held it out, looking at it. “Hopefully.”
She hadn’t had time to verify the box before Jericho showed up and she’d maybe been convinced he wouldn’t give us the time to verify it since she left so readily. Hard to say, but that seemed likely. I wouldn’t have trusted him that far either. Leaving was the right call but it left her uncomfortable, clearly. She still had the laptop we’d stolen from the office. Well, I did. I’d been carrying it since we got off the elevator. Nice thing about robot hands is they don’t get tired, I was finding out.
“Why don’t we stop somewhere, make sure it’s all in there?”
“Really? I figured you’d probably… you know…”
“Be hungry? Well, I mean, yeah. And thirsty, honestly. Thirstier than hungry. But I could go for some gyros. Unless you’re in a hurry.”
The nearest gyro place was at the edge of the business district, right next to ours. Probably be another thirty minutes walking. Marine clutched the box tight and shook her head.
“It’s fine. Gyros sound good.”
A ridiculous thing to say. Gyros always sounded good. Weirdly dry-but-moist meat that’s carved off a macabre cylinder of dead lamb parts? And then they stuff it in weird bread? And there’s soupy garbanzo bean dip? Name a thing that sounds bad out of that list. Nothing. And then you put cucumber cum all over it. It’s amazing.
It took us maybe an hour to walk that far. Few miles. Marine didn’t seem bothered by it, but why would she? Robot legs were probably expensive, but mine were going to be ruined so maybe I’d sell half my liver to Gravy or something. It’d probably be fine. Then I could walk for days. Not an activity I did regularly, but what’s wrong with being prepared?
A bearded man at the counter barely looked at us as the shop door chimed our entry. Marine went straight to a seat.
“Only customer can sit!”
Wow. Real service oriented guy. I walked up to the counter.
“Hey! We… buy… food. You… sell? Sell food? We buy.”
“I speak English. Very rude.”
“Yeah, you are very rude. So make with the gyros so we—” I gestured wildly between my chest and the general direction Marine was in “—can eat. The gyros.”
He noticed my hand for the first time and he went wide-eyed before immediately turning to get to work on the meatbreads. Payment cards were all near-field based, so I went and joined Marine at the table. She was already working through the data on her black box.
“Sorry about that guy. He’s normally… exactly like that.”
She didn’t say anything so I just leaned back in the chair and waited for a while until the meat devil called out that the order was done. I slid off the edge of the seat and immediately regretted having rested my legs. They were giant, muscular, handsome tubes of awful, debilitating fire. I nearly fell down but instead I did a weird, constipated crab walk. This seemed to further upset the gyroman. I’m not aware of whether that particular walk is sacred to any culture, but the look he was giving me made me really worried it was.
I looked at the baskets. There was no side of cucumber cum so I asked him about it.
“Hey, where’s the sa… sazz-eeky. Am I saying that right?”
He ignored me and filled two little plastic thingies with some and put it in with the gyros.
“Please go.”
“You know, you could smile more.”
He turned around and walked into the back. No idea what was back there aside from maybe more meat cylinders. Which seemed plausible. Just infinitely spinning meats, waiting to be chosen for the grand stage. Perhaps he was there to choose the next. To make a dream come true.
When I took the gyros away, I realized that he was just trying to avoid being near me. Sad for him because I’d forgotten drinks. I came back and he gave me a completely friendly, totally professional look and said nothing that might suggest that he wanted us to leave immediately.
“Hey, can I get two waters.”
He sighed pretty long but he got the waters. I really loved this place. That’s the sort of thing I expect from a trash hole gyro house. The pizza guy should come here from time to time. They could help each other meet in the middle somewhere.
I ate silently watching Marine work over the data on the box. She took a bite every now and again but wasn’t extremely interested in the food. I couldn’t find it in myself to blame her, really.
Gyroman obliged me with a refill on my water but promised me there would be no more free refills on the free water unless I bought something else. He spent the half-hour after we’d finished our gyros staring at us. Possibly hoping he would develop the ability to cause patrons he hated to burst into flames at will, but we remained uncombusted. The only thing I could im
agine that kept him from calling Virsec or the cops was my hand. It wasn’t an uncommon reaction, even in the middle districts. And entirely unsurprising this close to the big tall buildings with the respectable people in them.
Marine slammed the lid of the laptop down suddenly when I was totally not falling asleep in my chair. I jumped and made a noise and I heard gyroman do it too. I whipped around to look at him, but he looked away as soon as he saw me turn. Then he scurried into the back. The coward.
I turned back, excited. “What’s the news?”
She smiled, relieved. “It’s all there. Everything. Checksums are good. No weird new data. It’s untouched.”
I yawned. “You know, I really expected him to be lying. I’m glad he wasn’t… I think. You think they actually managed to pull the data off?”
She slid the laptop over to me. “Probably. But it doesn’t matter.” She picked up the black box and stood up from her chair and I did the same with the laptop. “I didn’t want it for that. And if dad’s AI or his brain or whatever this is… if that wants to help Vircore if they get it running, I’d be genuinely surprised.”
“Come again!”
Gyroman said that as we were leaving. That guy just wanted to be loved. I could tell. He was reaching out to us. Communicating through a facade of anger. The only way he knew how. My heart wept for him as I understood his troubled ways. We men of the sands.
It was a mostly quiet walk back to Marine’s shop. There was the occasional drunk or early worker. The buses hummed past from time to time. We didn’t say much, but I was really too tired to think of anything worth saying. Every time I tried to form a coherent thought, it got lost by the time the words got down to my noise holes. It could all wait I decided.
The sun was coming up and the morning had turned unbearably bright as it always seemed to. Like there was a spot in the atmosphere that intensified light to the perfect brightness to fuck your eyes to death. Squinting just made everything worse. Man wasn’t meant to be alive at this time of morning. Mercifully, we turned down Marine’s alleyway. The sun hadn’t come up high enough to peek into the buildings and the shift in temperature kind of shook me awake the slightest bit.
Marine stopped at her door.
“You going home?”
“You got a spare bed?”
“No.” She made a face like she regretted the answer.
I took a deep breath and looked up and down the alleyway. “So… I mean… is this it?”
She didn’t say anything. Admittedly, it was a bit of an odd question. She got her dad back. I had a robot hand.
“Yeah, ignore that.” I felt awkward. “I’m gonna go sleep, I think.”
“Okay.”
I started walking away from her shop. I hadn’t made it far when I heard footsteps.
“Laze, wait.”
I felt Marine’s hand on my shoulder, pulling me back and down. I’d only half turned my head around when I felt her lips on my cheek. She let me go and backed up a step, giving a cute little hop as she turned around and started jogging back to her shop. She stopped there, holding the door open, looking at me.
“Come by later, okay?”
“Yeah. I will.”
Cyberpunk
TRASHCAN
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