by Ren Warom
Shock’s had his on mute since speaking to Mim, which was dumb knowing her pro-stance on harassment. Now his drive’s buzzing away with angry message wasps, sending ripples like the after-effects of ECT to bug up his beleaguered brain meats. Cutting straight through the messy high of cheap bumps. He’d delete them all without reading if he hadn’t once taught Mim a way to circumvent that. Why did he do that?
“Because you’re an idiot,” he says to himself, sucking up coffee in desperate gulps and trying to ignore the clamour in his head, drown it with anger and caffeine.
Shock has zero inclination to listen to Mim haranguing him about this freaking Olbax job ad infinitum, but he does want the buzzing to stop already, before his head does an impression of a melon on the receiving end of a baseball bat. Can’t have one without the other, and the resulting rebellion paradox is giving him more of a headache than Mim’s messages, or a baseball bat. Maybe.
“Not enough coffee in the world,” he snarls, giving up rebellion as a bad job. She’ll only keep on sending them. Mim’s tenacious. Like herpes.
The first message, from thirty-six hours ago, is fairly calm, more of a query. He’s not fooled. Calm before the storm, that shit is. And here’s the storm, from message four onward, ear-bending as feedback, full-on rant-mode and he’s cringing, trying to whip through them all without really listening.
If only Mim’s voice when she’s annoyed weren’t drill-like in its ability to put holes in his skull. By the time he comes to the last, sent roughly two hours ago, he’s ready to tear his drive out with his bare hands and stamp it to dust, but the last is a surprise.
Hey, Shocking boy, there’s a party tonight. You need to get out and about before you turn into a pumpkin. See you there.
He listens to it twice in swift succession, wondering who’s taken over Mim and what it is they want from him. She sounds almost nice. He shudders, full body.
“Gotta be a reason,” he mutters, staring furiously at his coffee cup. The dregs are grinning at him. What in the hell is so funny? “You’re empty. Bastard.”
Wallowing in suspicion, he plays the IM again. Nope, that’s her all right. Saccharine mode. He can tell by the level of rot in his brainpan. On the back of the IM rides an info-shot, holding all the party deets. Shock wants to delete it on principle. Mim’s never been anywhere near as pleasant as this, even when things were sort of good, but she always dragged him to parties, to people, especially when he was most disinclined, which was most of the time.
He’s not averse, or allergic, nor even introverted, he’s just reluctant. He’s tried and failed so many times to explain that. Truth is, he hasn’t got a clue. It’s like the part of him that makes him a Haunt leaked out and infected everything else, stole his links to the world at large and the people in it. His idea of heaven would be to nest up in some garden flat in Sendai and never leave, just lie there listening to the birds, tripping out in the green light diffusing through the leaves.
Shock rubs hard at his eyes. Goddamit but he’s so tired. If only no were as simple as a single syllable. Mim’s sure to send an IM flood if he doesn’t turn up. No thought required for that, just a preset on her drive, and it’ll drive him crazy on demand. Besides, she probably only wants to grab him for a face-to-face over his reluctance to sort this Olbax shit. Job’s probably important to whichever scumbag she’s doing it for. Either way, no is a sure-fire route to more mental pain, which means he’s got to go for his own peace of mind if nothing else. He checks the time. Five hours to kill.
“I could sleep. But fuck that…”
Chucking his insultingly empty cup into the nearest trash-comp, Shock makes a beeline for the park. If he goes home—if the shitty little cage he’s currently holed up in can be called anything so friendly—he’ll end up lying in bed, eyes pinned wide, listening to the oldsters he calls room-mates banging on about their dicky bladders and bunions, their boils and haemorrhoids, and likely end up face-planting the concrete. When he does that, if he does it, he wants it to be because he’s honestly finished, and he’s nowhere near finished. He’s still desperate to find a way out of the trap he’s built for himself, a way to make everything right—a way to get back to Sendai.
He hangs out at the park till the sun is nothing but a memory and he’s shivering in his shoes. He’d stay on for the hypothermia, but makes his way to the party instead, before his lateness threatens to provoke Mim’s provocation. This party is located at some J-Hack’s safe house in the arse-end of Sakkura.
The place is a real find, covered in black mould and so sparsely furnished it looks long since abandoned, though all five of its tiny rooms swell with bodies, slicked together close as sweat-soaked hair to a cheek. They spill in to the corridor, lining the walls in a tangle of limbs and noise.
Shock squeezes through with his eyes closed, skin shrink-wrapped to cringing bones, and heads direct to booze central, a table in the kitchen so overloaded the plastic creaks in protest. Three bottles of cheap Chinese beer in swift succession give him the strength to turn and face the crush, in time to see Mim catch him in her headlights and fire herself at him like he’s a bullseye.
She’s wearing a flimsy bodysuit, and those old red bladers. Warning lights. Seeing them arouses a potent mixture of unease and desire. Shock ran those red lights without thinking when they met, and despite the pain of the resulting crash, he still hasn’t the sense to stop.
“Shocking boy. You showed.”
“I had a choice?”
She beams, all those tiny teeth too dangerous for words, and snags a beer, twisting off the top with one precise hand movement. He imagines it’s his dick, and goes lightheaded. Has to dig his nails into his palm to snap out of it, before meeting her eyes, wary as a cornered fox. In his drunken, unmedicated state Mim’s gaze is vivisection in a glance, excising the cool he had at Keen Machine and exposing his barely hidden continued attraction to her, soft and vulnerable as a torso full of viscera. He sneers at her—an old defence mechanism and quite useless. All but kicks the wall when he sees the gleam in her eye, that magpie-spotting-a-helpless-chick look.
She takes a long, slow drink from her beer. He can’t take his eyes off her throat, he wants to bite it, throttle it, and she fucking knows it. Amazing how much you can hate a person and still want them so hard. He should have run from her, shouldn’t have left himself this wide open. But how the hell could he not?
“Care to share your reluctance to open my IMs?” she asks softly.
“I’m busy,” he says.
First thing out of his mouth and it’s the sort of lie she doesn’t need evidence to laugh at. Shit. He steps back, trying to steal some space, some air to breathe. Trying to find minimal distance, to see her for what she is rather than the image he wants to see.
Trouble is, Mim’s not only a master at camouflage, she’s also a drug, and it’s no secret how he feels about those. If she crooked a finger she could have him, and they both know it. After all, he only broke up with her because she made herself a cliff and pushed him off. If she hadn’t…
She looks amused. “Busy? Getting high?”
“Yup.”
He necks his beer, grabs another two, earning a filthy look from some a-hole behind Mim. He ignores it, feeling hunted, cornered, and wanting to run away from her, back to her. Anywhere but here. Shock’s been running forever, and he’s so goddamn tired. He lost himself in Mim because it gave him an excuse to stop, because she’s a vacuum he can drown in. That’s partly why he finds her so difficult to resist. He’s pretty sure she’s wise to that. Mim’s got a killer instinct for weak spots. Hence the red bladers. She hasn’t worn them for years. This is all show, all manipulation. He’s so fucking stupid.
“I’ll get round to it,” he says to her, and there’s a resounding “fuck the hell off” wound through it. Being belligerent is as close as he gets to protecting his heart.
“Thought you’d say that,” she says, almost sweetly. “That’s why I invited you.”
“Huh?”
Mim gives him a calculating smile.
“This party, you do know whose it is, don’t you?”
The first mild stirrings of panic hit. Oh hell no.
“Whose?” he asks warily.
“Mine.”
Shock closes his eyes. When he opens them, Mim is gone. He doesn’t bother turning around, just sighs and says, “Joon Bug. Been a while.”
She wanders around him as if he’s a bike she’s considering dropping flim on and he cranks his head up to aim a nervous smile toward where her head might be. Joon’s a human skyscraper, outstripping him by well over a foot, but then he makes for an unusually short Korean man, barely topping five foot three.
She’s dressed in her usual uniform of scabby grey jeans and band tee, this one a black number so washed-out it looks dark grey in places, with the Rorschach pattern of some Doom or Deth band emblazoned across the front. He tries not to stare at her tits, though they’re staring him in the face. Joon’s not fond of folk engaging with her assets.
“You look rough,” she says.
“Being in my situation will kinda do that.”
She bends down to eyeball him. She’s got incurious brown eyes, deceptively sleepy, though she had her epicanthic fold taken out years ago for perfect, wide, delineated almond eyes.
“You chose your situation, dumbass. Zero sympathy. Mim says you have flim.” She quirks a brow. “I do believe you owe me.”
Stamping down rage and dismay, Shock stares purposefully at her tits, trying for the wind-up, even though he’s fully aware Joon’s big enough and mean enough to pound his face in for it. Shit though, being irritating is all he’s got now Mim’s screwed him the fuck over to get her way.
No surprises there.
“Yeah, I have flim. It kinda has to go a long way.”
Joon’s finger presses hard beneath his chin.
“Eyes up, bitch. And I don’t care how long of a way you have to stretch that shit. You owe me. Cough up, or I’ll turn you upside-down and shake it out of you. I know it’s on you, it always is.”
Ah, Joon Bug, always so altruistic. Long story bite-size? Shock basically got lazy on a job so boring it was giving him brain bleed a while back and hired in help, AKA JB, to handle it for him. Delegation, you understand. Anyway, fact is, he hired Joon, and then failed to spot her her share of the flim. Not paying wasn’t exactly intentional, but it happened to look that way to the untrained eye, and Joon’s been hungry for a bite of his flim balance, and possibly his flesh, ever since.
“C’mon, Mim’s little blue-eyed boy. Cough up.”
“I’m not Mim’s anything.”
“Keep telling yourself that, cupcake. Now gimmie my money.”
Shock digs in his jacket pocket. As she said, his flim’s always there, it’s the only place he trusts; stashes get stolen, cred gets zeroed out. He’s got just enough to cover what he owes and have a pittance left over for hitting a Slip shop to do the Olbax job. Which of course he now needs to light a fire under if he wants to get by and keep his lame excuse for a bed for the next month.
He’s going to be living on ramen and shitty bumps again.
Mim 1, Shock 0.
Right now his hatred for Mim could burn through every level of this godforsaken shit heap of a ’scraper and sink a hole in the earth deep enough to damn them all. He half wishes that would happen. At least then all this ridiculous shit would be over.
He slams flim into Joon’s hand. She contemplates it with great satisfaction, taking time to count every last one, and then stuffs it in her back pocket, where any fucker could steal it. He half considers trying, but he’s a Haunt, not a pickpocket.
Joon nods.
“Nice doing business with you,” she says. “Help yourself to nibbles.” And she’s gone, pogoing through the crush, her close-cut dusky-pink hair damn near sweeping the ceiling with every crazy leap.
For lack of anything better to do, Shock stays, ostensibly to eat, but the nibbles such as they are don’t appeal. He ends up drinking until his head pounds and reels, hugging the walls, avoiding eye contact with the few people he knows. Most of them ignore him back, used to his reticence.
People don’t try with him any more and that suits him just fine. How reluctance becomes a complete inability to communicate even his desire to not communicate is beyond him. There are the odd few, however, whose urge to know what’s going on with him now he’s become so thoroughly persona non grata with all the wrong people compels them to try to breach his barriers.
Eventually, buoyed by booze, two guys he knew at Tech, Fails like him, corner him to find out where he’s been, what he’s been up to.
He excavates himself out from under their questions as rapidly as possible, secretes several bottles of that Chinese beer in his jacket, and hightails it away. It’s not only discomfort that makes him want to duck their curiosity, nor embarrassment, it’s that he simply doesn’t know what to say to them: “I fucked up”, as a response, strikes him as wholly inadequate.
Nice Work If You Can Get It
Amiga wiggles a finger in her ear and squints up, watching the midday shuttle shoot toward the dark mass of a hub looming way above. At close range the sound of a transport launching would deafen, so they launch from pads sequestered away behind thick glass barriers, swallowing all but a faint burr that tingles the ears. Sleek and grey, they’re space-safe; able to reach hubs wherever they might be, in low or high orbit.
Many of the hubs fly over at least once a fortnight, taking in the Gung to allow for direct connections. Others pass more frequently in general orbit. Tokyo is their most frequent and most familiar. During low flyovers, on clear mornings before sunrise, you can see the city enclosed within in miniature, its lights glistening like multicoloured stars.
This shuttle is a direct connection to the Hong Kong Hub, no diversions, no skimming the atmosphere to rendezvous with say London, Chicago, Paris or MidWestern, and Amiga’s target missed it by a minute. She’s been stalking this woman not so discretely for about an hour. Perhaps to give her an opportunity to get away, she’s not sure. The parts of her that she doesn’t think work quite right are treating this as a game, like a cat playing with a mouse. The rest of her feels sick.
The woman is in a full-on panic, scrambling for a way out of the bay, still clutching her ticket.
There’s only one exit.
Sighing, Amiga shoves down the sick feeling and strolls after her. As she draws alongside, she takes the woman’s arm as if they’re close friends. The woman jumps, violently, and Amiga hugs her in to conceal it as best she can, carefully steering her away from curious eyes.
“Can’t blame you for trying to buy a seat on a transport,” she says, trying to be kind. “But your boss made the mistake of crossing my boss. That’s not something you run away from. You can’t shake Twist Calhoun.”
“A minute earlier and I would’ve,” the woman replies, her voice steady despite the pallor of her skin.
“Twist would still send me up to finish the job. He likes all his loose ends neatly tied. Better that you just let it be over and done with instead of always looking over your shoulder.”
“You wouldn’t say that if it was you.”
“No. But it isn’t, is it? And there’s nowhere someone like you can hide from something like me.”
Amiga’s IM chimes softly.
It’s not Twist, he wouldn’t chime, he’d just start talking. Whoever it is can bloody well wait. This woman was just a liaison, innocent really, and she’s minutes away from having to kill her gruesomely enough to satisfy her boss’s particular tastes. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone.
Her IM chimes again.
Does she imagine the insistent note? She opens the link, feeling super impatient.
Busy, she snaps.
Amiga, you’re always busy. Look, I need to talk to you about that job. You promised you’d at least hear me out.
Shit. It’s Deuce, her ex. Her choice not his and, oh boy,
is there a whole fucking novel of unspoken words between them about that. He’s also one of the leaders of the Hornets, a J-Hack crew of Fails and dropouts who let her live among them.
Despite making her home with them, Amiga will never be a Hornet. Because if she wants to work with them, she has to stop working for Twist. No negotiation. But there’s no fucking chance of that. They think hating a job makes it easy to walk away. Amateurs.
Given all that, Deuce wanting to talk about a job is super suspicious. Means their job must have something to do with Twist, and that makes her pissy. How is it fine for them to judge what she does, but okay to take advantage of what she does if it’s useful to them?
Fuck. That. Shit.
Yeah, yeah. Later. Working. Bye.
Cutting him off, she pops in a quick temporary block—he’ll only call back if she doesn’t. The woman seems to have taken Amiga’s silence as a reason to relax. Why are people so stupid?
“You could let me go if you wanted to. Please,” she says now, low and urgent.
Amiga can’t stand it when they start bargaining; it always ends with her hunting down a bar and getting categorically wasted. And doesn’t that go down well with her adopted family? Not like the Hornets never get drunk is it? But no, when she gets drunk, that is one hell of a subject for endless discussion. She’d rather eat her own face than discuss any of this with anyone, including her target.
“Your boss would never have to know. I’d just disappear. Board a land ship,” the woman continues, pleading.
Oh hell. Amiga closes her eyes briefly, they’re gritty, all sting and itch and feeling far too big for the sockets. Tired or sad? Either. Both. Enough. She has so had enough. Dragging the woman into an alley, she takes a small blunt metal bar out of her jacket and simultaneously rams the woman into the wall and the bar into her temple. It’s a precise way of killing, quick and clean—but you’ve got to do it with enough force to hear that crunch of bone shattering, driving deep into delicate brain matter.
The woman jerks, begins to twitch. Amiga holds tight until her body falls still. Slotting the bar back into her pocket, Amiga pushes two fingers into the pulse point at the woman’s neck. Irregular flutters. She closes her eyes again. Hugs the woman’s limp body against her chest and holds one hand firm over mouth and nose.
