v2.1

v2.1 30 MINUTE READ

//March 2nd, 3196, 13:20

h3x is in a coffin room near the Shafts, eating more unmodified nutrient paste, curled on his side to type. The height clearance in a six-foot coffin is about three feet, enough to sit in the bathroom tray and get hosed by the lowest pressure shower spray available on-planet, then crawl over to the imbedded foam pad and pass out. But it’s functional and cheap, and it comes with scrupulously encrypted wireless.

The owners know their clientele.

Virain: That was perhaps the sloppiest excuse for a run I’ve ever undertaken, but, I suppose, considering your brain was only a handful of days ago a sort of compote, we shall call it a success. Virain: At the very least we have these files, which I’m enjoying very much.

With his remaining funds from a more productive life, Virain had dispatched him back to the Bazaar to secure a dataslab and various other essential bits of gear. Then she had walked him through a nauseating scaffolding climb to rig sleek black line shunts into the network wiring of Chakrabarti Life Management. Finally, she had instructed him to hide in a dumpster with a cable tugged inside like an umbilical cord, dataslab hooked in, and held his hand through something like remembering how to ride a grav bike– in reality, cracking the defenses of a governing corporate entity to extract specific medical files on the most likely candidates to be, in secret, a hacker using the handle ‘h3x.’

She was right. He remembered most of how to do it. His fingers felt lighter on certain keys. Out of thirteen files taken, they finally settled on one which was correct with only a 0.001% potential for error. He got the feeling Virain was having more fun reading it than he was.

Virain: The name just trips off the tongue, don’t you agree? Virain: It’s like “cellar door,” two words which together are just so orally pleasing to pronounce. Virain: The way the lips fall open in the midst of the given name and then purse again, like a stolen kiss, in the midst of the surname. Virain: If you roll the final “r,” oh, it’s just divine. h3x: can u stop tonguing my vowels 4 one second and help me w/ this h3x: ur way 2 into my name btw im thinking theres a reason u never had it b4 Virain: There’s no call to be rude when someone pays you a compliment, sweet boy. Virain: But alright. Virain: Where are you? Still dawdling over school records?

h3x’s new project, having figured out who he actually was, was creating someone else. With shunts placed and the door kept open for him with CLM, Virain pointed out it might be prudent to come up with someone else to operate as and get them implanted as deep as possible. Someone had killed the person he was for a reason and that, whatever it might be, behooved him to be someone else. There were other reasons, too, one Virain called ‘The Accomplice.’

Virain: Simply put, I do not think you were in any kind of state to give your own tech a professional scrub-down and phone up the nearest A&E for a pickup after your DCL burnt out. Virain: Also, consider the smoking gun of the two cots. Virain: You were clearly accompanied by someone, which suggests a number of possible scenarios with a dizzying bevvy of potential consequences. Virain: Scenario one: you somehow maintained a close relationship with a person, unbeknownst to me, and they tenderly carried your body to the arms of psionics, then dutifully scrubbed your tech as you would have intended it be done to protect your work. Virain: Your use of a compad within a specific amount of time kept any failsafes, such as the one I was looking for, from being activated, leaving them waiting, despondent, for any sign of your continued existence at some designated reunion point— which you have of course forgotten. Virain: I see this situation as highly improbable based on several factors about you, foremost your personality. h3x: cool fuck u 2 v Virain: Know yourself and understand. Virain: Scenario two, much more likely: whomever contracted you to “ghostride” (as you so quaintly term it), their cargo also provided a bodyguard, or observer, to stay with you for the duration of the job. Virain: When the cargo was destroyed and feedback caused your brain to run out of your nose, they did the bare minimum due-diligence by depositing your twitching carcass at a charity surgery—where, if you survived, the likelihood you would be indentured for the privilege of continuing to live was astronomically high—then returned to clean up any evidence of involvement with you. Virain: Like myself and many others, they underestimated your cockroach-like ability to endure even life’s most crushing of defeats. Virain: However, that means that you being vertical, cognizant, and free to wander about might be inconvenient for someone with power who is unknown to you. Virain: Let me put this in words you can understand— Virain: It is well past time to “dip.” h3x: i hate that ur right Virain: You always have.

Everything is bullshit and now he’s shitting his day away building a Ghost when he could’ve been doing anything else. Like sleeping. More and more, lately, all he wants to do is sleep. The air in the coffin is close and warm. The thin blanket is weirdly heavy, probably a polymer threaded with lead, to keep the rooms from being occupied for too long. His eyes unfocus while Virain sends line after rambling line of instruction, admonishment, and come-ons. The movement of the letters coming in across the screen is more interesting at this point than the words they make and the meaning of those words chained together. In another window, a cursor blinks in an interface for a Low City primary school, inviting him to detail the early academic career of a man he hasn’t named yet.

A dim part of his mind warns that he’s let too many of her sentences pile up. He reaches for the keys with arms that feel sand-bagged in place against flush removal.

h3x: why am i doing this Virain: Primary school records are a bit of an embellishment, I admit, but it pays to be thorough. Virain: The security personnel on the elevators going up will be, and it would be beyond embarrassing, perhaps mortifying, for you to be caught out and sold on for something as quaint and trivial as not having a code-a-thon participant award in your file which you mention off-hand while boarding. Virain: And, seeing as no one ever saw a need to build spaceports beneath Birare’s surface, the next part of our plan will necessitate you coming up. Virain: h3x? h3x: ya thats the part i wonder abt i guess h3x: the plan Virain: We’ve gone over the plan several times, now. h3x: not the parts but like h3x: why

h3x’s eyes unfocus and he stares at the bleach-spotted plastic side of the coffin, curved slightly for ease of disinfection. His sense of smell has chosen an unfortunate time to come back. The bleach from the cleaning is strong, no piped-in scent like other hotels to cut it. But it’s not strong enough to cover the scent of desperate sex and flop sweat that wheezes out of the foam pad every time he shifts. A lot of people have lived fast, hard, and died here, probably. He settles on shifting less. More text scrolls up his screen. Even the part of his mind that has been prompting him to get back to Virain quiets as he blinks, slow, tracking one spot to the next, like the universe’s worst constellation.

His dataslab pings. He is one hundred percent sure it was silenced, and the audacity of the tiny, aggravating hack bothers him enough to look back at the screen.

h3x: stop fucking w my hardware Virain: Pay attention. Virain: You never let me take you in hand like my other darlings, and, while that was a minor nuisance, I allowed it because your focus and dedication has always been unparalleled. Virain: I understand you’ve suffered a grievous injury and may be coping with various psychological repercussions due to this and sudden, changing circumstances. Virain: But, h3x? Virain: You will respond when I message you. Virain: Promptly.

h3x stares at the messages on-screen and, through a dull fog that he can’t seem to shake, feels a rising, righteous indignation. It’s the strongest thing he’s felt in a while, he realizes, sending distant twitches of tension through his muscles, into his hands. One of the disjointed scraps of thought that dogged him through Low City hits—

—you talk to them that way, you don’t talk to me that way—

—and he’s moving. He snaps his dataslab out of its convertible position and flips it. The smallest screwdriver from his toolkit, spun between his fingers so fast the branding on the handle blurs, makes short work of the seven tiny screws holding on the back cover and exposes the slim piece of hardware’s delicate guts. With two cuts he makes sure the audio on it will never work again without time and soldering. He stares at the flat dataslab cabling in variegated colors like he’s contemplating haruspicy. Then he snips a few more things and the whine of the processor dies. He takes the battery out of his compad and snaps it in half, acid oozing up from the pieces, and throws it all in the bathroom tray.

It’s quiet in the coffin after that. He rolls to lay on his back and stares up at the ceiling. Vinyl postings advertise the nearest brothel that dispatches, a ‘medical dispensary,’ and a hysterically outdated fire evacuation route. The hatch that opens out for entry and exit is sealed so that no light gets in from the halls of hundreds of other stacked units just like this one.

He waves his hand and the LEDs around the edges die. It’s nice, in the dark, with the heavy polymer blanket and the quiet.

h3x falls asleep with his eyes open.

//March 4th, 3196, 20:13

h3x wakes up to a hissing pop, a flood of light, and two booted feet landing on either side of his face on the foam pad. He manages a gargled “what” before one of said feet kicks him in the head. He grunts and rolls out of the way of further attacks, letting his assailant drop down fully into the coffin and slam the hatch closed after them. The LEDs imbedded in the top of the coffin flicker to life in response to the sudden movement.

h3x stares, dumbfounded, at the skinny white girl crouching in his room, and sees his own blank face reflected back at him. She has MollEyes, perfectly shiny lenses surgically implanted over her sockets that seal her eyes away from recognition or analysis, a fad that never seems to die among techie kids who finally scrape together enough cees to hit a chop shop in Low City. Hers are blue but didn’t get enough tint. He can see some kind of movement behind them as she scans the room.

She looks at him and says, in heavily-accented Mandate, “Wow, Mother was right. You are dead. You didn’t even sneak a peek as I came in.”

h3x realizes belatedly she says this because she’s wearing a minidress in an amorphous gray material that turns her body shape into something vague and changeable, but his memories of waking are foggy enough and his interest in anything under her dress so profoundly less than zero that he just says, “Yeah, I’m dead, leave me alone.”

His mouth is parched and his voice a cracked, grating sound as it emerges. A vague thought surfaces from his confusion and brain fog. Water? When did I have water last?

“No chance,” the girl says. She sits in a jumble of limbs and tosses a shoulder bag down onto the foam pad. “I’m on a job.” She fishes a compad out of the bag and tips it to her ear, not even dialing, just picking back up a call in progress. “Yeah, Mother, I’m here. He’s dead, but, like, not dead? Looks dead but he’s up and talking, you feel? Want I should put him on?”

She laughs, without sound, just a wheeze and a grin. h3x can see the shadow of her eyes behind the semi-transparent plexiglass lenses flick over to him, then away again. “Woof, alright, got it. I’ll set him up. Uh-huh. Love you too. Byeee.”

“Set me up with what?” h3x croaks. Now that he’s awake and talking the thirst is too irritating to bear. He pushes himself over on his elbows to crawl towards the bathroom tray and collapses. Face-down on the plastic floor of the coffin, hands shaking in bursts, he has another, dim, thought: food?

“The fix, the cure, the revivification,” the girl says, digging around in her bag again. The cowl collar of her formless dress dips with her movement and reveals the numerals 14.8% tattooed in neat black on her clavicle. An Akela, a Teen, perfect representative and cautionary tale for the whole damn percentage caste, this one. “Mother knows I have the hookup, so she gave me the call. I’m Cagey, by the way.”

“You’re really not,” h3x mutters. He tries for a second time and manages to start inching towards that weak shower spray. He can see where the compad battery acid has eaten though part of the tray. Probably not the worst thing to go down it.

“Not cagey, though that’s fun, K-G,” she clarifies, chewing up the letters as she over-enunciates them, “that’s my handle, just KG, like the weight, because I’m heavy when it counts.”

h3x makes it to the tray and hits the switch. Tepid water pours over his face and shoulders, soaking his shirt and hoodie. He’s beyond caring. He opens his mouth and drinks as much as he can without drowning, gets sick, throws up just water and stomach acid, and keeps trying. KG grabs him by the ankles and hauls him out before the water and weak vomit can swirl up some of the battery acid and whatever else is left in the bottom of the tray, give him a bath he’ll never forget.

“Haha, man, you are fucked,” she says like it’s hilarious, and grabs one of the fibercloth disposable towels from the dispenser, drags it carelessly across his face. “You’re gonna cramp and die going on like that, gotta be thinking right to get right.”

“You some kind of doctor, KG?” he manages, coughing. Then another scrap comes back to him, “K-G. You were that fuckup who botched the run on… Kasaam Unified, K-U, what, six years ago, nearly got all of us busted because you spotted a dead drop of Reverie and had to chase?”

“I was sixteen,” she snaps, getting rougher with the towel, so he flops around a bit.

“I was fourteen,” he chokes out. “Sucks to suck, now fuck off.”

“Can’t all be the golden child,” she hisses. Then a thought occurs to her and she does her weird, soundless laugh again. “Oh shit, we really can’t, not even you! Because he died, and you’re just the corpse. Now dead-h3x needs sweet, heavy KG, because she’s got the hookup. Poetry! Life is poetry.”

“They didn’t put enough tint in your lenses,” h3x says, for lack of any better response. She slaps him, hard, across the face.

“It’s an aesthetic choice,” she insists. A light rain of pills comes cascading over him.

“What?” h3x says, again, because what. A baggie with a few granules of something gets stuck to his beard with water, and he swats at it to knock it off.

“Mother sent me to fix you,” KG says. She crawls over, plants a knee on either side of his chest and then sits on him, forcing the air out of him in a wheeze, knees digging into his armpits painfully. Pinned, h3x watches as she picks up the drugs she dumped out of her bag over him and begins sorting them on his collarbone. She’s bent almost double and her head is still grazing the underside of the coffin but if she notices or cares, she doesn’t show it. “Got a dim pic of the situation but it sounds like you’re having a little trouble feeling good! Fortunately, that’s my specialty. I got Lift, I got Psych, I got Squeal, I got Reverie for fucking sure, I got Hush if you need a downer for your upper or fuck up a date, I got something from the Marsak labs they’re calling Gizmo that’ll put your skin on backwards, I’ve even got a quarter dose of scavenged Brainwave— but you don’t have cheat codes, so you can’t appreciate it. Virain is buying the first round, lucky boy, so tell me what sounds good.”

“I don’t do drugs,” h3x mutters. The leaden exhaustion is coming over his limbs again. He can’t push her off so she stays sitting on him, heavy as she insists she is. He stares at his own reflection in her MollEyes until that becomes boring. Then he goes back to staring at the ceiling.

“Yet,” KG says. She bounces a little, making him wince as his ribs seem to grind together. “Come on, dead fish, I heard you were a Zero but not that you’re a square. If you don’t have a preference I’ll just pick something, and it’s probably gonna be Hush just to see and so I can have a little fun, but you can’t tell Mo—”

Her compad pings. KG picks it up and puts it to her ear again. “Hello? Sorry, sorry, I was kidding. I know. Alright! That’s cheap, though, and I don’t— yes, Mother. Thank you, Mother. I know! Byeee.”

“Man,” KG says, dropping the compad casually and picking up something off his collarbones, “she is helicoptering you, boychik.”

h3x is still staring at the ceiling when KG puts a razor-tipped thumbnail though the foil on a blister pack of blue pills, prizes a dose out, and presses a capsule of Psych between his eyes like a fucked-up bindi. He winces as the adhesive tugs his skin up and the micro-injector digs in.

A lot of things happen at once.

The first thing he feels is heat, from the point of contact on his forehead, squarely between his eyebrows. He has a weird, disconnected thought—

—anja, motherfucker, time to blast that third eye the fuck open—

—and then it spreads, drugs meant to be administered to muscle or vein running through facial tissues and capillaries instead, taking longer to hit and making his face burn. His heartbeat jumps into ears. It’s deafening, and he can feel its pounding in his chest, too, so fast he thinks he’s going to die. His vision seems to get sharper. His thoughts take up a specific order, and it’s familiar, how he thinks at his best. Everything is delineated and logical. Better, he feels pride in that, and confidence in what he can do if he sits up and gets a fucking keyboard in front of him.

He’s feeling a lot of things, actually. One of them is profound annoyance with KG. She’s still sitting on him, watching with a feral grin as the drug lights him up. Her nails are digging in where she’s got her hands fisted in his shirt and the razor-tipped thumbnail she used before is cutting through, beginning to sting as it draws blood.

“Mother knows best,” she says, with a laugh, leaning in so close he can track his own pupil dilation in her lenses. “Look at you, overclocking! What d’you think’ll happen if I stick a second dose on you, right above that one? Go faster or burn out? Let’s see!”

Her compad pings but she’s already picking up the blister pack again, grinning wider as she digs that nail in for a second capsule.

“I’ll just take the credits for the second hit off your chit while your thumb’s still warm enough to key it, things go bad,” she assures him, “so we’re square and all.”

He thinks, I want to punch her so bad, and his fist is already moving, Psych wiring his limbs for high voltage. He punches KG in the side of the head and hears a pop and a crack. One of them is a bone in his hand, because the vids make it look like nothing but punching a skull under thin flesh is kind of like punching a jagged rock under a blanket, he finds. The other is KG’s right-side lens. It cracks and a piece falls away.

“Blue,” he slurs, a manic giggle bursting out of him. “They’re fucking blue already, what was the fucking point?”

KG shrieks in outrage, shoves a hand back in her bag, and pulls a patent leather sap. The Psych moves him fast but not fast enough.

There’s a meaty thud as it meets his skull, and he blacks out.

//March 6th, 3196, 04:45

h3x: so item 1 h3x: fuck u h3x: item 2 h3x: did u cultivate a dr for ur psychosexual hacking cult too h3x: bc that was a slick trick on the neural stimulation psych would give me and uve never struck me as medically-inclined except 4 h3x: u know h3x: boners Virain: Like a breeze coming in off the cool, dark ocean, the return of your words and reason refreshes me in a soul-deep way. h3x: yeah yeah get ur fingers soul-deep out ur prose-hole and type h3x: also whats an ocean Virain: So rude! And yet, I adore the impudence now that I can feel the life behind it. Virain: Your fixation on “boners” only shows the limit of your imagination, my sweet boy. Virain: My daytime employment is, yes, greatly benefitted by knowledge of psychology and sexuality, as you’ve so subtly intimated, but also by study of the organs and glands responsible for producing or managing many of the associated pieces. Virain: Which is why, frustrated and seeking answers, a second review of your medical documentation yielded a grim explanation for your attitude. h3x: id love 2 be filled in on my own brain whenever ur done typing a bunch of words Virain: Shall I eschew my personal style for your edification? There will be an attempt. Virain: Your ability to process emotion was crippled by the damage to your brain. I suspected this might serve to make you even more efficient given time to recover, and was excited. Virain: An unfortunate side-effect to feeling nothing in particular about things, however, is that it isn’t exclusive to distractions. Virain: I was not attentive to your descent into ennui, where neither the work nor food nor your continued existence could prompt more of a response from you than an existentially ambivalent shrug, and thus did not realize how poorly you were doing until it was nearly too late. h3x: so what ur saying is h3x: i nearly offed myself bc i didnt care enough 2 not Virain: Yes. Virain: And I am sorry for not being more aware of what was happening and intervening sooner.

h3x stares at the compad screen for a moment before resuming the task at hand without responding. Re-soldering the wiring on his dataslab is tricky, ugly work. The compad was an easier fix. KG, or maybe somebody sent to clean up after her, left a new battery on the floor of the coffin which he found when he came to, alone again.

The partially-used blister pack of Psych was left behind too, and it called to him in a way he’d heard of and was dully frustrated to experience firsthand.

h3x did some experimentation. The first fifteen minutes were the real high, where everything was crystalline and beautiful, and confidence poured through him. The next fifteen minutes, depending on how the high had gone, were either afterglow or crash. The following thirty or so were a slow descent out of either one of those. All told, he was in a modified state for about an hour after each use, but could only use twice before his body really started to freak out. He noted his findings in a note on his compad so he wouldn’t have to repeat the work. He only had three doses left.

He’s seven minutes into an afterglow and rattling inside with feelings as he works on the dataslab, which makes him a little queasy. He keeps looking back at the apology. Virain isn’t typing more. It’s just hanging there as the last line in the window.

h3x: uh its fine its whatever cant catch everything h3x: like h3x: ur trying 2 work remotely and u cant even slave me 2 ur terminal to dig into the errors Virain: Oh, and how I’ve tried. h3x: wow that was bad Virain: I thought it was fun and topical, but I defer to your refined understanding of appropriate humor. Virain: (This is your cue to make a penis joke of some kind.) h3x: not feelin it h3x: normal not feelin it not dead 2 the world not feelin it tho h3x: so h3x: uh h3x: thanks Virain: It was quite literally the very least I could do, botched somewhat by KG, who is nothing if not a blunt instrument. h3x: why didnt she just go w ‘kilo’ it’s the same thing + more drug lingo Virain: I haven’t the faintest idea.

h3x turns his attention back to the now-cool wiring on his dataslab. He tests the circuitry on each side and everything looks fixed. Seven screws go back into the panel and he snaps it into the convertible position, tries a boot. Good as new. His chat client opens as Virain messages again.

Virain: Back to the use of Psych, I’ll be the first to say the situation isn’t ideal, but short of reworking a very specific piece of equipment I have here to electrocute you every time your eyes glaze over, my options are limited. Virain: The Psych is effective and the attendant addiction might actually serve to keep you motivated. Virain: And all for the low, low price of twenty-five credits a dose. h3x: 25c isnt cheap u bougie monster Virain: Compared to death, every price is cheap, my sweet boy. h3x: deep Virain: Accurate. Virain: KG won’t see you again, some unpleasantness about her implants, I take it. Virain: Which means I cannot facilitate this as efficiently as I would like. Virain: You will have to be an enterprising young man and learn to make your own drug deals, though it brings a tear to my eye to imagine you striding off into this new world of responsibility on your own. h3x: hhhhhhh Virain: I gather you’re not overmuch enthused by the thought either, from your proliferation of “h”s. h3x: its just h3x: a lot

h3x’s fingers pause over the keyboard and he takes stock. He has, to his name: a backpack, a set of grubby secure clothing, a toolkit, a dataslab, a compad, a metatool, two line shunts, a jumble of scrap electronics, a laser pistol the chrome’s flaking off of, and two power cells to save his life if it comes to it. Add also: 3 hits of Psych, and a powerful need for more. He has no friends, or, really, no idea if he has ever had friends, outside of Virain’s sphere of influence. He has less than ideal amounts of functional brain. He has a number of problems having more brain might help with.

Add also, now: a headache in what’s left.

h3x: im still like 20% high so take this w an asteroid-sized grain of salt but h3x: its all hitting me i guess h3x: im fucked up h3x: i cant do what i used to do + was good at h3x: gotta bail off planet SOMEHOW h3x: which first means i gotta get on the crust w/o some asshole taking one look @ my percentage and h3x: just laughing their ass off and kicking me back down the shaft h3x: got a $$$ new drug addiction and -$$$ creds h3x: my overwatch is u which h3x: no offense but like. what even h3x: and also apparently i sleep w my eyes open now bc i keep waking up w shit burning so ???

h3x rolls onto his back on the foam pad in an echo of the night he unknowingly started the universe’s most protracted suicide attempt, probably. The nice afterglow is slipping towards crash as he lingers over the fucked-up situation. That’s new. He makes a note on his compad and chat pings, so he opens it.

Virain: I know you are overwhelmed. Virain: Would that you were here, I would have you lay your weary head upon my knee and rest a while, safe and able to heal. Virain: I would card my fingers through those lovely dark curls you have and reassure you with immutable truths: Virain: One plus one does still, in spite of everything, equal two. Virain: I have only ever wanted the best of everything in life for you, and for you to be your very best, and if you have lost your knowledge of and trust in my aspirations for you, I will rebuild it. Virain: Regardless of what challenges you face ahead, as long as you take care and listen well, you are going to be alright. h3x: not 2 say i would sob into ur skirts or w/e but i guess h3x: that does help a little Virain: And then, having said that and seen you relax, I might trail the manicured tip of a fingernail around the shell of your ear, to see if the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up for me. h3x: and we’re done Virain: Boo. Virain: My twisted and subsequently thwarted maternal and sexual inclinations aside, as ever, I will tell you what I have always told you: Virain: Nothing is complicated, just extendedly sequential. Virain: Anything which at first blush seems insurmountable is only wanting careful scrutiny, a modicum of planning, and being taken to consecutively smaller pieces. Virain: Handle those smaller pieces in a logical order and, before you quite realize it, the complicated has been ordered and the mountain summited.

The compad screen is very bright in the dim of the coffin, even set to zero percent. h3x blinks at the screen and his eyes burn, and he attributes it to the light contrast, and, also, the fact that he apparently sleeps like a cadaver now with his eyes free to dry out.

h3x: answer smth 4 me? Virain: Anything, in varying degrees of candor. h3x: u said trust ur aspirations 4 me h3x: but not trust u h3x: and i dont h3x: why? Virain: Full disclosure?

[User Virain has sent a file! compiledfootage_collateral_h3x.mp6]

Virain: You knew what I had before, it seems only fair you continue to be aware. Virain: You can’t trust me, as much as it breaks my heart to say. Virain: But trust in my commitment to keeping and cultivating those I find useful, in a variety of skillsets and placements, and trust in the fact that, even after your unfortunate accident, Virain: You are still my favorite useful thing. Virain: Once you’re done watching that, message me. Virain: We need to talk about booking your passage to Zasoer.

The video is three hours and sixteen minutes long. h3x sits and eats a tube of nutrient paste and watches it. Around the first hour mark the tube slides to the plastic floor of the coffin, half-empty, forgotten. At the end, h3x fishes a fine point permanent marker out of his toolkit. In cramped capitals on the inside of his left wrist, he writes:

“DO NOT TRUST VIRAIN.”

Then he sends a message.

h3x: ok h3x: so h3x: zasoer

//February 23rd, 3196, 06:01

A girl sits on the cramped, dirty patio of a bar outside of Low City proper, the neon core distant and the dark complete except for puddles of electric lighting and rank candle stubs sending up whispers of smoke to further darken the bottom of the planet’s crust above. She’s drinking a Watung Lite on a ghost ID, and, every once in a while, someone walks up to her table and asks if she’s been stood up. Most ask if they can step in. She’s only had to break three fingers but the panic is rising in her throat. Has been since 3:00 AM.

If he’s alive, he’s coming, is all she can think.

“Hey,” the bartender says, a woman with three arms, all artificial, all different brands. She’s leaning out the patio door and looking at the girl. “Call for you.”

She hops up and comes inside, leaving her beer to sweat on the patio table.

“Where are you?” she hisses into the receiver, the moment it’s handed off to her. She angles her body away from the bar and the six pairs of ears there and covers her mouth with a hand. “I boosted a bike and I can circle back.”

“That would be an incredibly long trip,” says a woman’s voice in a crisp, World-City accent.

The girl pulls the phone away from her face and stares at it. When she brings it back up it’s with an even more frantic, “Who the fuck is this? What the fuck is going on?”

“Friend of a friend, my sweet girl,” the voice says, “I just thought I’d call and see if I could be of service. You look like you’re waiting for someone, and have been for a while.”

The girl’s eyes, behind sunglasses, dart to the two shitty security cameras she clocked coming in. They each sport a cheerful green LED to indicate functionality. They hadn’t when she came in.

“What’s going on?” she repeats, voice smaller.

“He’s not coming,” the woman says. Then, “Listen well.”

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 6/19/2018 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024