v2.0

v2.0 20 MINUTE READ

//February 23rd, 3196, 03:24

Light and dark. The first impressions are light and dark, no hard edges, just value distinctions. Then the woman with the dark hair leaning over into the light begins to come into focus. Sharp smile, twisted down at the corners. Her black hair is short and spiky around her chin and she’s saying something. What is she saying? She’s saying:

“Sir, can you hear me? Sir, do you understand?”

He blinks once, twice. Tries to figure out how she’s doing that thing with her mouth and tongue that makes speech. Oh, right.

“I didn’t do it,” he slurs. It occurs to him that isn’t what she asked, but those are the words that came out. She goes through a couple of different expressions. He can’t parse any of them.

“Because you’re on the table here,” she finally says, “I’m gonna have to say that you did.”

“Oh,” he says, sort of agreeing, because he is in fact on the table here. The table is hard-soft the way medical tables are but at least he isn’t being restrained. “Was it bad?”

The woman reaches up and grabs a metal bar on the bottom of a display screen and jerks it over, the long arm supporting it swinging around her head, and he’s confronted with a series of images of some kind of organic structure rendered in shades of blue and black. She traces the outline of something with her index finger. Her nails are painted a dusty rose. Then she says:

“You died. So, yes.”

The something is a head, he realizes, so the mottled whirls of blue and black must be a brain. He latches onto the thought that having a brain on the screen probably doesn’t mean anything good right after she said he died, and then, thoughts branching from thoughts, he realizes this must be his brain, and all of a sudden gets way more interested in what she’s saying about “grievous damage and loss of structures.”

“I’m a trained biopsionic,” she says, “so I’ve done what I can, more than most of the doctors here could have, because you were brought in right away. But you may find some… changes.”

Her mouth does that corner-twisted smile again and he has the thought that the combination of components to the look on her face should say more to him than it does, somehow. It doesn’t, though, so he just says, “Got it.”

They stare at each other in awkward silence. She hands him a dataslab with more information on his condition pulled up and sits down on a chair next to the table. She glances at a camera in the corner of the room, adjusts the way the creases of her medical jumpsuit lay across her chest, and clears her throat.

“Your treatment today was made possible by a charitable program of the Vikaas Combine, working to promote opportunities at all levels of the percentage strata, because progress is only possible when everyone does their part,” the biopsion recites. He scrolls down a paragraph on legal brain death and recovery as she pulls out a compad with a series of flashing numbers on it. “As part of the procedures executed to resuscitate you and minimize damage, the Drone Control Link implanted over the anterior lobes of your brain was removed, and the recoverable pieces sold to pay a portion of your charity surcharges. However, you still have a balance outstanding. I’m obligated to speak to you first about Vikaas Combine labor exchange repayment plans as an affordable option, even with your new mental limitations, for someone of your percentage to reimburse—”

He reaches into the pocket of the voluminous hoodie he’s wearing without thinking to find a compad of his own. He pulls it out, presses his thumb to the center of the screen, and waves it over the biopsion’s. The numbers on her screen stop flashing. She stops talking and stares at him.

“We good?” he croaks, skipping over a section on what, if any, part of his damage might be genetically transferable. She stands up and puts her compad away. She generously gives him a moment with the dataslab to transfer the document compiled on him before taking that back, too.

“Unless you have any further questions, your debt is settled, and you’re free to go,” she says. “Though I’m also obligated to inform you that use of joss to pay medical fees or charity surcharges is punishable by fines of up to one hundred thousand real credits or labor for fifteen to thirty years, depending on the amount fraudulently exchanged.”

“That’s rude,” he says, slowly, picking through her words to try to figure out what part made his shoulders climb towards his ears defensively, “I think that’s rude, maybe I’m just rich and slumming it, you think about that?”

Her eyes flicker to where his collarbone would be under his hoodie and shirt. “I really can’t say I did.”

He flips her off as she leaves the room and slides to the edge of the table. His head feels too light, like it’s full of helium, and he wishes he had a gram weight number on the DCL they took out of him so he could account for the feeling as either being logical or emotional.

//February 23rd, 3196, 04:01

The biopsion doesn’t bother to tell the nurses or security that he’s square, so he has to endure the indignity of standing in the front lobby of the clinic while they send someone to verify with her in-person, apparently distrusting a digital message. Every few minutes a different member of security hooks a finger in the neck of his shirt, tugs it down, stares at the number tattooed on his clavicle, and shares a meaningful look with everyone else assembled. Eventually, though, it seems every person of authority in the clinic from the supervising medical consultant to the head of sanitation gets word that he’s paid up, really, and they disengage the maglocks on the front doors to release him onto the street.

He almost wishes they hadn’t. There’s a lot happening on the street.

He finds a bench and sits on it cross-legged, facing the back and the wall behind it, because the noise and light of the crowd passing by is a lot, and he gets out his compad again. Pressing his thumb to the center of the screen like he did before lights it up and brings up a quick-pay interface, but swiping to unlock it brings up a row of six blanks and a keypad.

Six numbers. Mathematically and without exaggeration, one million possible combinations.

He tilts the screen to catch the dim light outside the clinic. Pronounced finger smudges left in place over the one, the seven, the eight, and the zero, besides the center thumb smudge for unlocking. Only four digits, so there must be repeats. He tries 178000 just to see. A message pops up that reads “STOP TOUCHING MY COMPAD.” Whoever he was, he was a smartass. He tries 017888. A second message: “THIRD WRONG TRY WIPES IT DON’T WASTE MY TIME.”

He stares at the compad until the screen dims back to black and it turns into a shoddy mirror. He can pick out the highlights, though: prominent nose, scraggly beard, chapped lips, two dark eyes under heavy brows, the right one looks bloodshot, and, under the left, a blackwork tattoo descending from the lower eyelid over the cheekbone that looks like circuitry. He yanks at a half-face mask bunched around his neck and pulls it up to hide as much as he can, finds it crusted in blood. Figures.

He turns the compad over but there’s no engraving or sticker that says “THIS COMPAD THE PROPERTY OF [NAME].” He flips it back to the screen side and closes his eyes. Thinks about activating it to pay in the clinic and, dimly, wanting to check an account balance.

His thumb seems to move on its own. 110781. It unlocks.

—stupid, he thinks, apropos to nothing. Trying to chase why he thought that makes the thought slip further and further away.

He spends the next hour opening apps and reading messages, processing numbers and squinting at the infrequent picture. There’s a lot to take in and, frustratingly, he finds himself needing to reread and revisit bits six or seven times to retain them. The biopsion’s voice keeps looping in his head: “you may find some… changes.”

“What kind of name is ‘h3x’?” he asks himself aloud.

//February 23rd, 3196, 05:17

h3x hits the Low City Bazaar half like a tourist and half like a local. He keeps gawking at the neon of everything, all the lights and signage and graffiti, but his feet carry him at the same effortless, unhurried pace of the people thronging around him, not allowing him to rubberneck for too long even at sights that intrigue or confuse him. The air is stagnant because the wind simulators are down again, he hears. The roof overhead, reinforced to support the surface city, is unlit in a perpetual night.

Three people drag what he at first thinks is a bot, because of all the chrome, but realizes from the way the limbs heave as it’s dragged is a person, towards a low building. Mottled dead skin lines the edges of uncountable imbedded metal and carbon fiber pieces. A crowd gathers around it and the doorway of the chop shop, called SELA’S U-CUT WETWARE from the sign with the red, flickering argon saw over the door. A woman leans out a window and screams, “No pick-and-pay on cyberpsychos till we check for Revenant Wiring!”

The crowd collectively groans.

He squeezes down a side street and finds himself fully bathed in red glow. Working bots at a brothel across the way pose, interesting counterpoint to the dead cyberpsycho as they’re only wearing synthskin where it’s most requested. There’s a hologram ad for a young human man with the digits “24.6%” picked out in tempting ruby, spinning above his projection, along with the words “IN USE UNTIL 2.27.96 AT 16:00. RESERVE NOW!” h3x feels nothing in particular taking in the storefront so he ignores the posturing of the bots and shoves his hands in his pockets and keeps walking.

h3x makes it out of the alley in time for his local’s feet to pivot with everyone else nearby as someone stalks towards him. His eyes fixate on glow again, but a dim part of his brain recognizes bioluminescent henna in whorls of dangerous mehndi when he sees it, and doesn’t let him openly gawk at the light coming off the woman as she passes.

—street samurai, Calcutter, merchant of slick death, five hundred and sixty-seventh avatar of Kali, certified bad bitch, his thoughts say all in a jumble, him feeling something for the first time in a while as his guts jangle with fight-or-flight instinct. Cyberware eyes lit with the same virulent shade of pink as the mehndi on her skin glide over h3x’s face as the deadly woman walks by, movements too spare and efficient to blend with the crowd, and he thinks, again, do I know why I died? Do I know who killed me?

He doesn’t, but apparently they can’t afford this particular assassin, because she keeps walking through the Bazaar, merchants quieting their hawking until the last hint of her light and her eyes and the razor-sharp monoblade strapped to her back disappear twenty meters down between stalls. H3x rejoins the flow before it can push him to the edges of the street with the urchins and the druggies and the thieves, using the wake left by the assassin to push further in.

He really doesn’t know what he’s looking for.

A hushed warning runs through the crowd over the next couple of minutes, and he thinks there might be another parting to admit another killer, but instead people start snapping open umbrellas and propping tarps up on poles. h3x glances up again. The smooth ceiling of Low City is still blank like a dead compad. Then it explodes in static as sprinklers turn on hundreds of meters above, and artificial rain comes sheeting down.

He realizes that he’s smelling something for the first time in a while as the water plasters his hair to his head and begins to soak his shoulders. He saw street meat stalls and someone welding in a lean-to and a row of public toilets as he walked but thinking back now he didn’t smell food, or hot metal, or shit. Water runs over him and the sense returns. It smells like Calone—

—methylbenzodioxepinone, eau d’scum, does not fucking wash out, his mind supplies again, unprompted—

—saturating the subterranean city in the artificial scents of ozone and fruit. He tips his head back, pulls the bloody mask back down, and tastes a little. Some kind soul punches him in the shoulder so hard he almost falls over.

“Don’t drink the water,” the person says, leaning into his field of view with a glassy look. Two capsules and a patch are stuck to the side of his neck. He gives h3x’s shoulder a hard slap again and says, “Petrochemicals and psychosuppressants, man, that shit’ll fuck you right up. You a tourist? Don’t drink during a flush.”

h3x twitches his hood up over his head and nods. In his pocket his compad buzzes. He fishes it out, haltingly thumbs in the code he mumbled to himself for half an hour like a mantra. Tapping the alert brings him to a stripped-down chat client.

[User Virain created a new thread “Checking in”!]

Virain: You know it’s quite rude to keep a lady waiting.

h3x locks his compad and keeps walking.

//February 23rd, 3196, 08:13

His walking brings him to a stoop of a quick-fab apartment block on the outskirts of the Bazaar. He shelters under the overhang out of the rain, which doesn’t vary in intensity or direction until at last, abruptly, it stops all at once. His compad has been buzzing non-stop for the last few hours, whoever Virain is filling the new thread with line after line of rambling, over-formal chatter. He thinks about responding several times but sets the urge aside.

He doesn’t remember much about anyone named “Virain.” What he does remember isn’t good.

Virain: I have every indication that you are online, and yet you refuse to speak to me at all. Virain: I can only assume that this means you’ve lost both your hands in an ill-fated endeavor to shave that travesty you call a beard, and haven’t thought to use your tongue to painstakingly craft an apology for your delay in response. Virain: That, or you’ve given up on your usual work and are seeking a career in internet porn, which means you are relying upon my release of blackmail files from your hazing, coupled with my reputation, to propel you to stardom and an embarrassment of credits. Virain: To which I can only say: I will release the files as threatened but with the addendum that you are a moody and selfish lover, who has hurt me deeply, which will surely cripple your chances of making it anywhere. Virain: h3x. Virain: My sweet boy. Virain: I’m becoming impatient.

h3x gets more uncomfortable fight-or-flight jangling in his gut and locks the compad. He stands at the same time and, with his hand still mid-arc back to his pocket, activates something with a cheery ding. He looks up to find the front door of the apartment block open.

He read a little more of the report on his brain while he wandered and then sat. Damage to long-term declarative memory could impair reintegration to family or work structures, but retained technical, task-oriented memory and muscle memory may ease the transition back into everyday living.

He stares down at his feet and then lets them keep carrying him where he needs to go.

His compad opens another door on the fifth floor and lets him into a trashed apartment. There isn’t much in it to start with: a couple of cots, tangles of dirty clothes, food rations both empty and unopened, dirty plastic dishes, and, stacked in the small bedroom, a rubble pile of destroyed computer parts spilling onto several large smears of blood. At first, from the disarray, h3x just assumes he’s a messy person. Then he picks up a bare drive left lying on the floor and turns it over.

It’s drilled in six places.

He spends the rest of the day sifting through the wreckage and finding evidence of a very thorough destruction of every piece of tech in the apartment, but nothing on why, or who. It’s possible he did this, but he has no memory of it. It isn’t saying much. He doesn’t have a lot of memory. But he does have snatches of things he assumes happened right before he got fried over-easy. A few vignettes of seeing rockets come in on greasy black propulsion trails, and feeling a burning, righteous indignation that hits him hollowly now. Images of a computer screen in front of him.

He looks up at the desk he unearthed from tangles of cabling, and the monitor sitting on it. That screen, actually. And it had been lit.

More buzzing from the compad. He sits on the floor, defeated and hungry, then crawls over to a tube of unflavored nutrient paste and clumsily screws the cap off. He looks around for something to spread it on or season it with and, finding nothing, just eats it straight from the tube. It isn’t as bad as he expects.

Virain: We are actually rapidly approaching the thirty-two-hour confirmation mark, at which point, without a heartbeat from you, I’m obligated by our compact to release the files. Virain: So allow me to drop my digressions and games for one moment, if it doesn’t trouble you too much. Virain: h3x, if you have died, you were supposed to have an automatic relay of confirmation, so I could retire your handle. Virain: I will be very disappointed in you if you failed to execute this simplest of failsafes and have your handle bitten by some amateur with an eye for drone technology, not the least of which because it will hurt my reputation for keeping only the best in my stable. h3x: uh

He sucks at the nutrient paste tube, wondering why he said anything. An animation at the bottom of the screen shows Virain is already typing a response. He should’ve kept quiet. But the idea of some weird blackmail getting out when he already doesn’t know what’s going on isn’t appealing either.

Virain: There’s the wit and blistering intellect I’ve been languishing in the absence of. Virain: So, you are alive, or, embarrassingly, a particularly canny street child has stolen your compad, and cracked your fingerprint interface and security code— in which case, urchin, are you in need of work? Virain: I find myself with a sudden employment opportunity on offer. h3x: no h3x: i mean yeah im alive but no to w/e it is ur talking abt h3x: could u slow down 4 a sec im a little Virain: ‘A little’ what? Hung-over? You’re hardly the type. Indisposed? As if you could keep good company. Ill? I thought you were living well enough now to avoid the pitfalls of failing flesh. h3x: i uh think im worse off than that h3x: look everything i remember says this is a stupid idea but i got no other ones so im gonna send u a file i got when i woke up 2day and if u could just tell me what tf im supposed 2 do thatd be great Virain: It’s hardly like you to pass off a tricky puzzle but, for the novelty of the experience, or, perhaps the nostalgia to your less competent days, alright, attach this file and let me have a look.

[User h3x has sent a file! Prognosis_UnidentifiedMale_02.23.96.xbt]

Virain: This is a document, not a code file. Do you suspect layered data? h3x: just read it ok

h3x eats from the tube until it’s just a coiled foil spiral attached to the plastic nozzle. He crawls over a little further until he can tug the blanket off of a cot. He curls up on the floor of the empty, turned-over apartment and waits on a stranger to finish perusing medical data on his death and subsequent resurrection.

The compad vibrates after fifteen minutes of nothing.

Virain: Two minutes and sixteen seconds dead. Virain: 928371 only went down for thirty-three seconds after facing off with Securant’s AI two years ago. Virain: If you haven’t lost everything, you’ll be a flat-line legend. h3x: ya i uh think i mightve lost everything tho so fuck me i guess Virain: Hardly. Virain: You sound just the same, regrettably. Virain: As for identifying the larger extent of your memory loss, beginning with a series of simple questions is likely our best course of immediate action. Virain: I’m surprised you weren’t made to answer any at the surgery. h3x: i could pay + didnt take the labor plan Virain: Ah, Low City. Never change. Virain: To begin, an essential piece of vanity if I’m to be your partner in this undertaking: what do you remember of me?

h3x lays on the apartment floor and sifts through pieces of thoughts anchored in his mind after the loss of everything else, for reasons he might never understand. His thumbs fly over the keys as he types.

h3x: well uh its vague but like h3x: just a lot of black latex Virain: Yes. Virain: What else? h3x: the colony Virain: Now we’re cracking on. What about the colony?

h3x’s typing slows. This is a larger, more complex piece to tease out.

h3x: the viraine colony mission h3x: with the e h3x: it was still too close 4 u Virain: Intellectual property theft is a very serious matter, h3x. Virain: And a person’s handle is sacrosanct. h3x: yeah and thats why u hacked their drill routes h3x: and put them in a black hole Virain: Very, very good.

[User Virain has sent a file! morstuavitamea.spx]

h3x clicks the file and an image loads. It’s a scanned poster for “the Grand Endeavor of the Viraine Colony ship,” entreating interested potential colonists to visit their local Dhawan Corporate location and interview for the unparalleled opportunity by August 1st, 3183. At the bottom righthand corner there’s a kiss mark in red lipstick, gone darker with age.

Virain: Is that all you recall? h3x: most of it h3x: otherwise its just disconnected shit h3x: little more as we talk and when i walked around h3x: like i think if its gonna come back its gonna come back when something tags it otherwise its gone Virain: A sound enough hypothesis to work from. Virian: It stands to reason, based on that idea, that supplying you with more factual or sensory information to process might better realize what’s left of your memory in the wake of this disaster. h3x: sounds great but im gonna level w u here h3x: i dont even know my own name 2 do a vanity search Virain: What a beautiful opportunity this is, then. Virain: I’ve always longed to know more about you. h3x: cool thats not fucking unsettling at all h3x: ugh. shit. so how do we start what do we do Virain: What we do best, my sweet boy, or, what you formerly did best and will come to do best again, as the case may be. Virain: We’re going to hack you.

h3x rolls over onto his back in the tangle of blankets and sighs. His arms shake just holding his compad up to message over his face, threatening any moment to drop it on his nose. The exhaustion of the injury, the lack of prescribed medication because he didn’t take a labor plan, and the general confusion of the day took it out of him.

h3x: thatd be a super dope + useful plan if not for h3x: screamsheet h3x: chboy doesnt remember how to hack Virain: I’m upset that you remember what screamsheets are and not more of my exploits. Virain: From what I read in that assessment, a number of skills associated with the work might very well have been retained utterly unmolested by your little wetware gaffe. Even setting that aside, however— Virain: I made you once. Virain: Doing it again will be a trifle.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 6/3/2018 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024