Abusus non tollit usum

//April 16th, 3197, 17:24

Vivian Bowes steps out of rain to have a smoke in the awning of a derelict repair shop on 9th. Her umbrella clicks off the moment it stops picking up the minute impacts of the rain and fizzles one last time, super-heated, before she’s left with just the handle it projects from. She sticks it in her shoulder bag as the steam floats away, and digs out her cigarette case.

Vivian loves rituals. She knows this to be one of her least self-destructive quirks so she indulges this particular ritual often: snapping the case open, selecting from the black and gold Yeheyuans before snapping it closed again, two quick taps against the case, then flicking a matte black nail up the hinge to conjure the flame. Light, put the case away, inhale, hold.

Cigarette smoke follows the rain-steam and she lets herself relax, for a moment.

9th is dead. Gurinder M&D hasn’t come through with the black poly panels to seal the doors, but the spark of life has leapt from it, as it leapt from 11th, Cross, and 12th before it. Abyssus abyssum invocat. Not enough capital injected in the right areas, and now there’s a necrotic finger dug into one of the few remaining bastions of population in World-City.

The rail stop is the only significant pool of light in the dim, rainy evening for a half a block. She could have gotten off at a closer stop; soon, of course, they’ll close the one on 9th for “repairs”—

—we mustn’t ever speak the name of death lest we be forced to confront it, naturally—

—and it will never reopen, and she won’t have the luxury. The walk is an indulgence. Many of her peers accept the zipping convenience of private transport afforded to them by caste and are shuttled from destination to destination without a moment to take in the urban decay. Vivian needs her moment.

She needs to think.

Pinkie out, flick ash with a tap of the ring finger, exhale another cloud of smoke. The marquee in the bottom of her right eye helpfully informs her it is currently 17:28 and she has a dinner date at 17:30. She blinks and it fades from bright red to translucent pink in the corner of her vision. For her plan to be most effective, Johnny needs to sit with no one to bounce his personality off of for a bit. She takes another drag and glances across the street. A flickering holo displays a sad-looking infant sitting next to a brick wall, reminds her that “USING CONTRACEPTIVES HALTS PROGRESS!” in Mandate, Arabic, and Naya, courtesy of her friends at Chakrabarti Life Management.

The time ticks down. She turns to the window at her back.

Vivian reaches up and begins tugging strand after strand of platinum blonde hair out of the severe twist it’s gathered into atop her head. Not too many, not so much that she looks unkempt. Just a millimeter shy of composed. She smudges her eyeliner with a precise fingertip and checks her reflection one last time. Yes. There. A little stressed, a little tired, but well within standards. Her marquee flashes that she has new messages in her secure chat. She pulls out her compad.

Welcome, Virain. You’re viewing thread “fuck off outta OC space,” with two contributing users.

h3x: ok u werent kidding abt the ship contact to istibeesra right h3x: like zasoer is chill or w/e compared 2 home but uh h3x: its been a year and still no idea who murked me i need 2 be gone Virain: Patience. Virain: I do not kid. The transport will not be luxurious, a hull berth, but it will be available. Use the Phool rahi sarson call and response when the time comes. You do still recall your ancient Urdu, don’t you? Virain: The owner has worked with me before, lucratively, which helps considering the proposed length of the trip. She asks only 1000c for the favor. h3x: one fucking god h3x: thats 40 hits v Virain: Yes, my sweet boy, I can do simple math. Virain: This is your best chance at leaving the Conglomerate’s sphere of influence and information trading. In terms of preserving your life, it weighs in a little over forty hits of Psych, however essential. Virain: Attempting to pass joss on my contact for your passage, by the by, would be unacceptable. I have a reputation to look after. Virain: Again, I must emphasize patience. Perhaps take up a part-time job? h3x: thats hilarious h3x: ya let me just uhhh get my face and biolocks in a conglom system so i can sell froyo Virain: It might be worth the risk of exposure just for the image of you in a pastel uniform and smock, meticulously perfecting the swirl. Virain: On a serious note, there’s always the Market, though it may take some time to establish yourself as a new operator on Zasoer. h3x: ya also not trying to spread my handle around Virain: You could always change it. h3x: no Virain: Frozen yogurt it is, then, and I will not weep for you. Virain: However you assemble the funds, do it quickly and discreetly, with minimal chatter. Virain: I’m occupied tonight. h3x: u occupied or “occupied” Virain: A deep-net cutter could be at your skip in ten minutes if I felt the urge. h3x: ok so its ur big mystery project h3x: good luck i guess uh h3x: hmu if i can help? Virain: You can’t, but, as ever, darling of you to offer. Heading out now. Virain: Oh, and before I forget, h3x? h3x: what Virain: Happy early birthday. You’re 22 tomorrow. h3x: fuck

Vivian finishes her cigarette and sets off towards 7th and Kendreey.

//April 16th, 3197, 22:10

On a world where people are data, data is money, and money is everything, it’s hard to be a man without a face or a name.

h3x checks out a couple different avenues, just to see. Basic ghosts only go so far in reputable Conglom business, though; after a certain point everyone wants blood, or at least a cheek swab, for a DNA profile and background verification. Non-contract programming work is shit and more exploitative than the criminal work. The criminal work isn’t an option without changing his handle, and that’s not an option because he’s a moron. He’s a moron because he keeps thinking—

my handle was my name before I stole back my name

—every time his fingers hover over the keys to set up a new account on The Market.

h3x spends a few hours in lotus on his rented bunk, like V taught him, digging through the archives of his fragmented memory. Dodging loops is exhausting, but he can’t fall into one and lose a day trying to remember if he’s ever done anything in his life besides wreck computer systems for cash.

He finds something, pinned in place by trauma in a part of his brain not wiped clean. That probably means it’s the worst idea he’s had since he bit it, but h3x thinks he’s nothing if not enamored of fucking up, and suffering for it.

The business with the best system infrastructure and user reviews for the work is called Dicer’s, well away from the spaceport he’s been hanging around since landing on Zasoer, into the downtown sprawl of Lan-se. The aesthetic is confused, probably because it’s a renovated culture dip to the concrete and gold-chrome gambling dens that were popular, according to Omnipedia, sixty years ago. The addition of holos advertising its new attraction is jarring, but it speaks to good tech. The tech is essential. A trodenet slipping on him mid-shift is the only reason he remembers how checkouts work at all.

He finds the rear door and hits the buzzer, gets let in to the stock desk. The woman behind the counter clocks him for an addict the moment he steps in, but he’s prepared for that: he’s dressed better and coifed as well as he could manage in his shitty rented bunk, which scrambles the signal his rail-thinness and faint trembling broadcasts a bit. He leans on the idea he might not be a total waste with professionalism.

“Checking out,” h3x says, sliding ID on a ghost three years younger across the desk to her. She glances at it and then links it into her terminal, reading over the data attached. He puts on a little more confidence than he feels as he says, “Done it before, don’t have to brief me.”

“How long?” she asks, typing fast.

“What’s my rate?” he asks, then adds, “What’s your longest shift?”

“Fifteen an hour for new stock here, if this medical work-up is legit,” she says, “and club policy is four, max.”

“It’s legit,” h3x assures her, because it’s tricky to fake and dumb to play with, and he verified Dicer’s dumps all its harvested biological data for the sake of discretion. She still checks it with a bioscanner sweep, but it’s not worth getting pissy about. “Put me down for four.”

“Contraceptive derm’s an extra three off your total, mandatory,” she says as she types up his contract. h3x tugs his shirt collar open and to the side. She blinks.

“Make an exception?” he ventures.

“You’re on the wrong side of the Conglom, Zero. But yeah, no point. Noted.” The woman shakes her head a little but issues a locker key, sealed cleanup kit, and trodenet in plastic packaging. h3x takes his ID back as she points down the hallway behind her. “You’re in room five.”

“Can I get six?” he asks before he can stop himself.

“You’re in five,” she repeats, looking aggravated, “or you can go somewhere else.”

h3x heads down the hallway and lets himself into room five.

There’s a full-length mirror concealing the door on the other side and no handle, and as h3x pushes it shut behind him, there’s a click and a hiss of pressurization that says it’s not opening again until his time is up. A screen behind the mirror flickers on, displaying a countdown. Ten minutes for prep.

The room is small, dominated by a bed and a locked nightstand with a tablet interface flashing prices he ignores. He slings his bag off his shoulder and under the bed, into the concealed locker, which he opens with the key he was issued. He strips methodically and shoves his clothes in after it. The key goes in a compartment on the side that seals shut like the mirror door, on a timer. Then he hits the en suite.

A shower eats six minutes because it’s been a few days and it clears his head. His last hit was early in the morning and he’s feeling the drag of lethargy. He rips the trodenet out of its plastic and runs it through his hair, smoothing the contacts into place on freshly-toweled skin: two at the base of his skull, one behind his left ear, one at his right temple.

The gesture is familiar. He recalls the report on his fucked-up brain with a subdued mix of gratitude and bitterness: retained technical, task-oriented memory and muscle memory may ease the transition back into everyday living.

h3x checks the connection in the mirror readout, pointedly staring only at the words displayed and not himself. He gets a series of sensations in quick succession—flash of orange, taste of red pepper flake, feeling of degradable plastic—and his hands flex without his thought, fingertips tapping thumbs. Connection solid. Minute and twenty-seven seconds on the clock. He waves his hand over the indicator to fully activate the neural override, scrolling through disclaimers and liability statements with a flick of the finger before the countdown changes again, then goes to lay down.

h3x checks out with twenty seconds on the clock before the door facing the bed, the one not concealed, opens.

//April 16th, 3197, 17:45

Johnny Dandekar is waiting at a corner table in Crossings at 7th and Kendreey when she comes in. She can see him from the door, but only just. The maître-d stops right as he’s offering menus to a pair of Middlings and steps over to take her coat as she begins to shrug out of it. One of the Middlings, young and hair obviously several hours’ wire-work, turns to complain. She chokes as the coat is swept away and Vivian tugs her dress straight from the brief disturbance.

The dress is undoubtedly fantastic. White as the coat, slashed with geometric cutouts. A favorite. There’s a diamond at the neckline with permissibly scandalous placement, framing the creamy swell of her upper breasts, and the neat black numerals of the 57.8% tattooed below her left clavicle.

Vivian watches the woman’s pupils dilate and thinks, A compliment tied to genetics. Then, the horrific attempt at a proposition.

“You have beautiful eyes,” the woman says, appropriately reverent.

Vivian suppresses an unkind laugh. “Thank you, dear, they were a gift.”

She steps around the woman, whose right hand is unconsciously pressed to the pendant necklace she wears to draw the eye up, over, there, to the gap in her own dress. 46.8%. The pendant is amateurish for that percentage but she is young. At least Crossings isn’t in 9th Avenue decline, yet.

“Viv,” Johnny greets her, and kisses her full on the mouth. It’s art. He learned from the best and gets hourly practice when he’s not on set to film a vid. This is Vivian’s hour. She pulls back and cups his face in her hands, thinks, Do you know, Johnny, that I have a picture of a boy whose lips rival even yours? I stole it from CLM, and when I look at it, I fantasize about reminding him to put his lip balm in his pocket before he goes to school.

She says, “Johnny, my sweet boy, dinner first.”

“I haven’t seen you in a thousand years, Viv, forgive me,” Johnny says, and it’s impossible not to, so she does. He was genetically destined to be gorgeous and surgically enhanced to heart-breaking. His lips are scandalous until he smiles, and then they’re a crime. Nose, cheekbones, jaw, and chin— all cut glass, skin lower shaded with stubble conditioned to tickle, never scratch. His eyes are dark and always faintly wet, like he might cry, no matter his mood. Vivian had called them sensitive at twenty-six and now at forty-two she calls them dangerous. “You never vidcall, you never message, I was starting to think Frederik had flunked out of specializations.”

“With my brains and your looks?” Vivian says. “Statistically improbable. Now I don’t want to be a problem first thing, but do you think we could possibly steal a table by the window? I so adore the rain.”

Johnny’s jaw flexes on the right side but his smile is immediate and indulgent. “Nothing to it, Viv.”

The staff are thrilled to have Johnny Dandekar move to a window seat, and the three tables in front, behind, and to the right of them are subtly marked as unavailable with differently folded napkins. They sit in a bubble of artificial privacy and even Johnny can’t help but joke:

“If I didn’t know you, Viv, I’d call you social climbing.”

He’s wearing a mesh-paneled dove gray shirt, zip not button, tailored to fit him like a second skin. One of the panels has been designed, just like her dress, to frame. 61.2%.

“Thankfully for both of us, you do know me better,” Vivian says with a brusqueness she doesn’t feel. Between the new seating and the implication he’s mildly offended her, as well as fifteen minutes of impatience prior to anything, Johnny sits uncomfortably for a Sixer and lets the Quint rule the table.

Press advantage, she thinks, and produces a thin smile.

//April 17th, 3197, 02:08

h3x is in a World-City loft, the kind he’s only seen in vids, working on P versus NP. Most of the walls are glass and he’s on a high floor— not a penthouse, with the largesse of balconies, but up there, high over the city that stretches to every horizon without end. It’s night. That’s good, because he still has a little trouble with the vastness of the sky now and then. It also lets the city shine.

It’s more alive here, dead blocks reanimated in Dicer’s system with cut-and-pasted lights, so the whole thing gleams from a thousand points. Like someone took the stars and scattered them on the ground. There’s a soothing order to the city’s artificial in-fill, to the flawless gridlines of the streets.

h3x is at a desk with a surface of brushed stainless steel, cool against his arms. He has a dataslab, one of the really choice ones, with the surface textured to emulate mineral paper and a stylus that’s a pleasure to use instead of a hindrance as he scribbles the proofs and the circles of the diagrams. Every few minutes he pauses to take a sip of water. It’s cool but not cold enough to hurt his teeth.

He drinks the perfect water and looks out, as he does it, over the perfect city, and thinks only of complicated math.

Then his four hours are up, and he blinks at a club ceiling.

Prognosis: not great, but probably not the worst shift he’s ever had. h3x sits up and winces at expected aches and those out of the ordinary. Finger-spread black bruises on his hips, a crick in his neck that makes it aggravating to look around, but above and beyond is the sting in his ribs on the left side. He’s dimly optimistic about that, though.

He levers himself up and into the bathroom for a luxurious ten minute shower and complimentary blood panel. The hot water sluices red down the drain from the three needle pokes joining the countless trackmarks on the inside of his left arm. He’s pronounced clean in the bathroom mirror right before he shampoos his hair, belatedly remembering to tug the trodenet off, hold it out of the shower, and drop it in the trash alongside its original packaging.

The woman at the stock counter is ready for him when he emerges, dressed and with bag slung back over his shoulder, to turn in the locker key.

“You’re being comped twenty for the bruised ribs, with Dicer’s apologies,” she says as she totals him up.

“Dicer’s the place, or Dicer, a person?” h3x asks, vaguely curious. The woman just stares at him so he says, “Uh, seems fair.”

Eighty credits hit his empty account as he passes his compad over for the transfer.

“What’s the layover policy here?” he asks.

“Twelve hours, or one with a verified clinic visit,” she answers, already looking bored with the conversation, undoubtedly well aware a clinic visit would run him more than eighty credits, “but we won’t compensate if existing injuries are aggravated, and your rate drops to ten, non-negotiable.”

h3x just nods. “See you tomorrow.”

He lets himself out into the dark of the very early morning between Dicer’s concrete and gold-chrome pillars. A holo ad cycles on his left, reminding Dicer’s prospective clientele that YOU CAN BE ALONE… BUT YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE LONELY! His body can’t decide which it wants more: Psych, sleep, or for him to walk into traffic. He pulls out his compad to message Virain.

h3x: ill have the $$$ by the end of the month Virain: How’s the pastel uniform? h3x: so flattering h3x: hope ondiat is worth it

//April 16th, 3197, 17:48

“Our beverage list, sir, madame,” the server at Crossings says, interrupting the fraught dynamic at Johnny and Vivian’s table as smoothly as he can, offering a slim black fold. Vivian huffs a soft laugh.

“Ah, yes, the teas, just what I was looking for. My dear, where is the wine list?” she asks.

The server looks at her with confusion, then disbelief. He breaks into a tentative smile which only widens as she remains uncomprehending. Vivian’s stomach drops.

“Apologies, madame,” he begins, lowering his voice in a gesture at discretion, “but our doors screen, you see, to verify displayed percentages and for compliance with planetary policies, based on a brief medical profile compiled, you understand, we cannot… Madame, do you not know?”

“This is exciting,” Johnny comments, propping his beautiful head on a hand.

“Perhaps you should tell me, love, before you expire from holding it in,” Vivian says, managing a kindness in her tone she doesn’t feel. She knows. It’s as if she’s hearing each word a millisecond before the server shapes them, though she hadn’t bothered to check for herself recently, occupied otherwise.

“You are two weeks pregnant, madame,” the server announces, clutching the beverage list to his chest, “and, may I be so forward as to be the first to congratulate you!”

“You may,” Vivian deigns to say.

“Congratulations!” the server blurts. “Ah, Chakrabarti Life Management, which Crossings’ parent company MulGrow has a close relationship with, mandates that dining establishments in World-City refrain from serving alcoholic beverages to those found to be pregnant. But I would be more than happy to bring you a specially prepared virgin cocktail of your choice, on the house!”

It’s experience that lets Vivian burst into a radiant smile and order a mint soda. Johnny orders a Metropolitan and when their drinks arrive raises his glass to her, back in his element celebrating a life-defining success the same way they had when Frederik was a dust mote on a scan.

Advantage lost.

“Who’s the lucky fuck who gets to argue with you over names, this time?” Johnny asks. “Seeing as, unfortunately, it wasn’t me.”

“You know, Johnny,” Vivian says, trailing a fingernail around the edge of her glass, watching the soda water fizz carbonation to the surface of the drink and moving mental pieces to find her way back to her goal, “I… haven’t the faintest.”

Johnny tuts. “You used to keep better records than that. You look tired, Viv.”

“It’s the strangest thing, I was going to say the same to you,” Vivian says. She isn’t lying. Her affectations of fly-aways and imperfect makeup pale before the lovingly covered, but nonetheless covered, circles under Johnny’s eyes. That, and the delayed way he blinks and sips. She leans in conspiratorially and whispers, “Is your new clinician very good? It appears as though the Reverie is playing a little havoc with your nerves.”

“What is this, now, five?” he attempts to deflect, but she can see the hit lands in the way he sets the drink down with increased, calculated speed. He opens his menu and scans the appetizers for a humorous aside he can conveniently remember. As ever, her mind goads, press advantage.

“It’s seven, three of which came to term,” she corrects. She couldn’t have asked for a better segue, though, so she allows herself to sag just so and muses, “In another world, perhaps neither of us would be quite so… touched by fatigue.”

Vivian studies him over her mint soda for a hint of inner conflict, the sign she’s seeking. Her implication is almost childishly transparent. She counts on it to be laughably so if the server should be snooping further, should the floral centerpiece have buds of a more technical nature, should a street cam across 7th pull the words from her lips.

His eyes do change. Vivian’s stomach sinks for the second time, and she thinks, Johnny Dandekar, how many times have I broken you over my knee, to lose control of the situation now?

Johnny tenses, corners of his mouth twitching in the ghost of a smile, like he’s heard a joke that isn’t funny at all but he has to pretend it is. He murmurs, “What’s the saying? Monogamy is for Dusaras and love is for children, Viv.”

“Who said anything about either,” Vivian says. It doesn’t come out as a question because she knows she didn’t. But Johnny just orders the appetizer for both of them without consulting her, a pointless power play considering his place above hers is tattooed into both of their skin, and leans back in his chair.

“This isn’t ever going to be another world, and not everyone’s so upset about it they have to bemoan, or, I don’t know, tightly control, their work,” he drawls. He hides his slow-moving hands behind his head as he folds his arms, the picture of ease. “So, chin up, huh? Celebrate! You’ve got a decent shot at breaking the record on live births, if only in age of delivery.”

“Yes, and with the stims and stabilizers you’re on, your agent will keep you pumping until ninety-five. How’s the view from thirty-four, Johnny?” Vivian snaps. He can tell he’s landed the hit in the brief, uncontrolled flare of her anger, and she can tell he knows. The scent of mint is cloying between them.

“It is,” he lies, with a wide smile on those terrible lips that doesn’t reach his shining eyes, “a pleasure to serve Birare.”

//April 17th, 3197, 11:12

h3x wakes up sorer than he went to bed and checks the timer he set on his compad. Four hours and change until he can work again, and three in the afternoon won’t exactly be peak hours. Time to kill. He fantasizes about swiping pain derms from a pharmacy, ends up thinking about how quickly overzealous, robotic Conglom Corp Security units could break every bone in his legs before handing him off for indenture.

He sighs into the foam slab he’s laid out on and listens to the moron in the bunk below his try to cry quietly.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to freeze her accounts?” he calls. The sniffling hitches.

“No, she’ll be back from Cartaxa, she wouldn’t do this to me,” a soft voice replies, after a watery throat-clearing. “She’s just scamming that guy, anyway, she’ll come back— with our money, too.”

h3x gives up on the human race. He decides to go for a walk and get high.

Walking when the body doesn’t want to walk is painful, stupid, and counterintuitive, but he gets a tiny, distant thrill from disregarding all the error flags sent up by his nerves. It also helps a little with the stiffness. His ribs ache as he takes deep breaths because the Psych, freshly applied and still deep blue, pushes him to breathe deep and walk fast. He’s lost. It’s okay. He pushes his earbuds in deeper and tries to remember where he was on P versus NP, but it’s hard without the immersion of the Dicer’s neural override mainframe to aid his recall.

“Are you here for Charity Day?” someone asks, loud enough to jar him through the music he’s listening to. The Psych makes him jumpy and he yanks his earbuds out hard enough to damage them as a result. There’s a hopeful-looking girl in a pastel yellow worksuit standing by a ticket booth. She calls again, “You’re here for the free day at the zoo?”

“Uh…” h3x tries to remember if these are code phrases for any of his local dealers who might be working through a proxy. “…maybe?”

The girl jumps forward and grabs his hand, reeling him in and brandishing a stamp. h3x has to suppress the drug-induced urge to kick her knee in and dip. A little hologram of something appears on the back of his hand, moving in a loop above the carbon-inked circuit now stamped on him.

“RealExperience is thrilled to welcome you to our monthly Charity Day at Lan-se Wildlife Exhibition,” she rattles off, only Psych helping h3x really track what’s going on as she makes him swipe his compad over the ticket reader and pushes him through the gate, “your participation has been tallied to let RealExperience and its subsidiary companies know that you value a ‘real experience,’ T-M, with creatures outside of virtual spaces when given the opportunity, helping keep this day available to all in the city! Thank you for your visit! Your holostamp is good for re-entry for the next three hours at only a portion of normal admission!”

There’s an edge of desperation to her voice that makes h3x think this isn’t a prelude to any drug deal he wants to be a part of. All he manages aloud is, “What?”

She drops into a hissed whisper and loses all trace of customer service charm. “You don’t have to stay, I just need bodies through the gate. My little brother lives for the free day, okay, dickhead, I need numbers.”

“What’s on my hand?” he asks, eyes hung up on the holo loop.

“It’s a lion,” she says. “You know, like from vids? A lion?”

h3x looks up at the graphics sliding across displays up and down the entrance gate he’s been shoved into. “What’s a zoo?”

The girl abandons him inside and goes back to trying to grab other people off the street. Earbuds broken until he can sit down with his metatool, high as shit, h3x goes to find out what a zoo is.

A zoo, as it turns out, is a kind of animal store, except you can’t buy any of them, it’s just displays. He walks from one plexi-enclosed exhibit to another, propelled by Psych, blowing past other willing or unwilling visitors gawking at the things inside. By the time he’s down to a few final, precious moments of the high, he’s seen all fifteen they have here and hasn’t retained any written information. Psych sometimes does this, turns his experiences into blurs of sound and color and movement. He’s looped twice when he finally ends up resting next to something sort of calming. He tries to focus on the sign before it changes to a language he can’t read again.

Polar bears, Ursus maritimus, and Virain would be pissed if he confessed he still can’t really parse Dead Latin but neither the third or fourth word make any sense to him. They’re white, is the only thing, visually sparse, and their enclosure is a lot of the same, interrupted only by grey rock and slate blue water. He stares at the polar bears, impossibly large, lumbering around. His heartrate slows as he comes down. He exhales hard and gets out his metatool. Work on his earbuds begins in fits and starts because he keeps getting distracted by the holostamp on the back of his left hand.

“I know it was free, but it’s weird, right?” someone says, nearer the enclosure and off to the right. h3x glances up and does a double-take. Thankfully, they’re not talking to him. It’s a heavily pregnant person with faded pink hair tied in a knot, and they’re addressing the person they’re leaning against as they watch the polar bears together. “Seems like a lot of money to just keep these things around, not doing anything.”

“You did this at the museum, too, babe, you’re so uncultured,” the person being leaned on teases. They squeeze the pregnant one, hand movement flashing a steel band that catches the light. “Just take it in, let yourself feel something about it.”

“I feel bored. When’s our flight, again?” they reply.

h3x tries to tune them out, but it’s been a sensory high so he’s having a sensory crash, faux-hyperacusis keeping him from hearing what he wants to be focused on and dialing the couple’s chatter into high fidelity. He’s been trying really, really hard not to be weird about pregnant people. Not to be looking for their entourage of family, ready to jump anyone they fear will bring bad luck on the gestation, especially a squirrelly Zero. Not to mentally tally exactly how many he’s seen, baffled by the wealth of healthy terms and live deliveries just a solar system away from a dying world, how that math feels wrong. So he’s being not-weird about that, but they’re loud. They’re loud, to his fucked-up perception, and familiar, and intimate, and comfortable showing it, and somehow all that’s culture-shocking him more than the pregnancy.

He’s trying so hard not to tune into his exact emotional state that he catches something he’s missed on his previous loops of the zoo:

The polar bears, two in the enclosure, blink at the exact same time.

//April 16th, 3197, 19:06

Vivian Bowes lets herself into her rooftop complex and doesn’t bother to toe her heels off next to the door. A fine metal arm unfurls from the closet, looking for them, and paws at the air before retreating again to continue monitoring the shoes she’s deigned to return to her foyer closet’s automated depths.

She strides down the main hall, widening into clean, open living spaces she ignores. Facing her is a large wall hung with artfully arranged digital image frames. Professionally shot vignettes of three children’s lives in various boarding schools welcome her home, alongside a portrait of her father cutting the ribbon on his new space station, pale blond hair stuck to his forehead beneath the engraved words proclaiming it the BOWES LINGUISTICS ARCHIVE. Vivian ignores the shot of Frederik, so topical, that hangs on her right— Johnny Dandekar’s wet, dark eyes overflowing with sincere tears in a face that’s all her bone structure, on the day of his pre-selection to Kassam Unified’s management core. She presses her hand to a picture of herself from her PR days. The ad reminding parents to sign their children up for fertility testing with her blushing, fourteen-year-old face dead center disappears to reveal a palm scanner.

There’s a low ping as it verifies her hand, and part of the wall slides back in a puff of cooler air.

Floggers, whips, harnesses, restraints, and racks of clothing replace the carefully-curated interior design of her living room. The click of her heels is louder on the tile here by design, a specially-engineered air gap with acoustic effects, only muffled as she crunches across bloodied rock salt on her straight path to the next wall in front of her. Behind the standing cross is another palm scanner, this one made to blend without framing.

Another ping and the pillory to her left slides back. More heavily-conditioned air and the smell of solder creep up from a dark staircase.

Virain steps down into her sub-level and kicks her heels off in the corner.

“Contena, come online,” she calls, padding towards her desk. Ten screens blink to life as she unzips the back of her dress and steps out of it. “You were remote with me, what happened? Dandekar’s profile matched the alleged sympathizer.”

“Reinstating in home system,” the soft, Nayan-accented voice of her VI says, then, “processing. Yes, his psychological and career profile were a match. I am running three concurrent analysis programs to generate data about tonight’s failure. Current working theory: something said led him to believe you were an agent of Chakrabarti Life Management, or one of its subsidiary companies.”

“My CV would say I’m an agent of CLM, I just don’t understand what trigger phrase I might have let slip that would provoke that specific kind of response. Why in the world would he bring up love?” Virain mutters. She snags an old sweatshirt off a server rack door and pulls it on, identifying herself as a former attendee of AHSAD TECHNICAL PREPARATORY in faded capital letters. “Put my internal footage on screen two, pull network updates on one, three, and four. Anything pressing?”

Her screens fill with data, the second one letting her relive her dinner in first person, footage pulled directly from her cybernetic eyes.

“Aspect and 7r1x’s run on XPRS Logistics yielded a substantial amount of data on patented plastics manufacture for drill travel, although they continue to express confusion as to why that is at all important,” Contena begins. “KG is still detained pending indenture. The Phonomancer passes on the Ilmam Archive in trade, as well as their ‘deepest respect;’ all malware implanted in the archive has been neutralized. nartak, Aleph, and shilpa_9 have completed…”

Virain lets Contena’s voice wash over her as she scans the data herself, clicking on items, typing missives, and all the while glancing back at the video of her dinner, watching for the moment it all went wrong. Contena only rouses her from the flow of maintaining her cult of personality for a final, delicate item.

“Lastly,” it says, “Moksha kee Panth have sent a message: ‘It is time to take her eyes.’”

Virain pauses in her typing, considering this. “Very well. Send my swatch for the replacements, when the training is done.”

“It is customary for the other avatars of Kali to bestow her colors, should they choose to induct her into their ranks,” Contena reminds her, with careful diplomacy.

“I’m aware, my dear, but as I’ve been such a generous supporter of the avatars’ work and security over the last few years, I’m certain they can make an exception,” Virain says. She glances at her reflection in her polished glass desk, stroking a black nail along the lower curve of her eye. “It’s not as if I’ll be able to pass this hue along any other way. Send my swatch.”

“Of course, Virain.”

She and Johnny have just received the thrilling news of her pregnancy on screen two. Reminded of it, Virain gets up and wanders to the wine cooler by her bins of scrap electronics, selecting a glass and a dry Veinso Riesling. She resettles with her drink and watches her evening dissolve.

“What’s the saying? Monogamy is for Dusaras and love is for children, Viv,” Johnny says, in beautiful high definition. She runs it backwards and forwards, zooms, plays it over a few times. He says, “Monogamy is for Dusaras and love is for children— Monogamy is for D— Love is—”

Virain pauses, zooms in further on his right eye, sips her wine, and thinks. “Contena, who’s doing Johnny’s makeup these days?”

There’s a pause. “I apologize, Virain. Recent actions by anti-repopulation and caste abolitionist groups have led Chakrabarti Life Management to keep employment data only on secure servers, especially for contracted individuals in the fifty- and sixty-percent fertility castes. I am unable to retrieve this information.”

“I am forced to make a run,” Virain surmises. She drains her glass in one long swallow and recorks the bottle. “What a terrible fate, I say, with deep sarcasm. Prep my interface.”

“Of course, Virain.”

//April 17th, 3197, 11:13

The couple falls away in h3x’s vision as he stares at the polar bear exhibit. His metatool folds itself shut and his earbuds slither into his lap. Uniquely used to finding and analyzing patterns, h3x sits and stares and looks for more. There. The same grooming gesture, eleven minutes after the first performed by the other animal, same movement, duration, shudders of fur. They’re cybernetic. He remembers that root from Virain’s lecturing, not Dead Latin but another dust language he’s forgotten the name of, anyway, it’s kybernetes: a captain, a steersman, a pilot, a navigator—

—checking autonomous is basically pointless, your Ghosthelm hardware is tight, but it’s ritual, so you observe it and then let your projection drift up through the roof of the grav-barge’s piloting well. The sight of the translucent orange hands of your holoform stabilizes you, staves off the nausea of visual immersion while in motion so you can just appreciate the job, the journey—

h3x convulses, briefly, on the bench. The couple doesn’t notice.

—the sky, every time, so fucking surreal after life under the black roof of Low City. The ruins of the East Sand Wastes, ground glass waves lapping at the skeletons of World-City skyscrapers succumbing to abandonment, the grav-barge sliding between and through, haunting. You kick back on a crate in absentia, made of light, projected by a brain imbedded with the hardware to send you anywhere a drone can fly—

He’s up and walking to the far-left wall by the exhibit. A fingernail cracks but he finds the seam he knows will be there.

—but the chill out, the meditative peace of ghostriding, doesn’t last. Roar of distant, distorted petrochemical propulsion. You glance over your shoulder idly, because there’s nothing on sensors—

A line to his compad is enough, he’s typed on a screen this size since he died and he’s faster than he ever was before. Crashing through thin I.C.E., put up as security theater, because who would hack this? They’re all fake. He has them all.

—the rockets are too low-tech to be on sensors. But they don’t have to be high-tech to kill you, they just have to hit. Taste of metal in meatspace and someone is screaming, they’re screaming, “Ra—

h3x blinks out of the flashback to the sound of plexi cracking under force.

“Run!” the couple screams at him. There’s a burst of shards and a wash of cool air, and then a nine-hundred-kilogram artificial polar bear hits the concrete path on his right.

“Uh,” h3x says, “shit.”

It doesn’t attack. That would be a lot of programming overrides, work he wasn’t capable of, or apparently interested in, while hacking through a fugue state. It’s just… wrong. The bear attempts to step forward with all of its feet at the same time, stutters, stills with unnatural precision, turns its head twelve degrees to the left, and issues forth a loop of recorded bird song between carnivore teeth, audio pulled from the aviary three exhibits down.

h3x is already walking, but now he’s the slowest moving person in a crush of terrified visitors thronging for the exit. He glances left and right for Conglom Corp Security converging on him. None of the vicious bots yet, but he sees the nine-foot-long python swallowing its own tail out of the corner of his eye. It’s also articulated into a perfect hexagon on the floor of its enclosure.

“Shit,” h3x mutters, thinking of Virain typing ‘discreetly’ in chat, “shit, shit, shit.”

The girl in the yellow worksuit is yelling as people flood past her out of the zoo. She’s yelling, “It’s a one-time error, one-time, don’t review! Not today, please!”

h3x lets the crowd carry him past and limps back towards his bunkhouse.

//April 16th, 3197, 19:41

The custom trodenet lights up as Virain unspools it and jacks it into her primary console. Her cult would call her retro, to be kind, or deprecated, to be honest. But Virain is humble enough to know when she could use an advantage, and smart enough to use one to its full potential.

The human mind is still, after all these thousands of years, optimized for hunting and being hunted, picking up visual patterns and disturbances in a space that spell prey or danger. Writing is a technology developed later, coding much later. She smooths the contacts into place at the base of her skull, behind her ear, and at her temple, takes a deep breath as Contena counts her into the system. 5, 4, 3, 2—

Her sublevel disappears as a sprawling city of light unfolds before her.

Virain is made of light too, in the visual construction of the net her interface provides, a ghostly gray holoform she controls with a thought. The trodenet translates her impulses to typed commands through its control over her body, forming a connection that turns her prowess with code into what feels like natural, intuitive navigation of the virtual spaces her system builds for her. She slides through gates of CLM corporate permissions, cracks spiky white Intrusion Countermeasure Encryption barring her from confidential servers, and walks through violently red fire walls without pause. It feels a little too simple for the level of security the files should be under, but she puts the paranoid thought from her mind as she finds what she’s looking for.

Seeing yourself hack like some kind of action vid star was popular when she was sixteen and just learning how to use her computer to leave the clean, controlled spaces of Ahsad Academy’s intranet. Now this method of perusing cyberspace has for the most part been left behind— save, of course, the times she orders a prospective disciple to modify a trodenet to create their collateral. Superstition, Unexplained Cyberspace Phenomena, and the rediscovery of AI still alive from before the Scream, the Deep Ones, drove hackers back behind the safety of a screen separating them from total immersion in the digital.

As if not seeing something makes it any less a threat.

Code on a screen leaves little opportunity for art, as well, and the scene constructing itself before her reminds Virain of it: CLM’s valuable reproductive assets are rendered not as holoforms like her, but perfect digital reproductions thanks to the corporation’s intensive documentation, the same way her darlings are in the videos they make her. CLM’s assets stand idly but around them, like clustered admirers at a party, are all the contractors associated with their upkeep, scheduling, and healthcare needs. It could be the planet’s grandest dinner party if it weren’t for the way, when she shifts her perception to a top-down view, she can see the perfect circles and precise connections shared members make. It’s startling and absurdist. Virain enjoys it immensely.

She pointedly ignores herself as she sets out among the crowd. Finding Johnny isn’t hard, it’s merely an issue of finding the biggest circle and pushing through to him. Finding a single makeup artist out of his hordes of support and security staff is the real task.

“Contena, narrow contractors to close-contact approved staff only,” Virain murmurs, in the real world. In the digital, swathes of nearly-faceless people-constructs, less detailed due to less interest in their every facet by CLM, blink out. Johnny’s horde is smaller but still extensive. “Just personal care attendants from that sub-group, now.”

The crowd narrows to roughly thirty-three. Still a lot to dig through. “I have a theory, my dear, and Johnny has… preferences. Narrow again, removing anyone who doesn’t identify as female and has hair longer than twenty-six centimeters.”

Seven left. Much better. Virain dives in.

Pulling data on the contractors has the peculiar effect of making them more real, like Johnny. She cracks the financial records on his primary masseuse and finds debts to Visage, and the eyes of the figure before her pull taught, surgically lifted and widened. His makeup specialist for outings is a contractor Virain herself has worked with before, a Middling with an estranged child. Tested out as a Dusara, 28.3%, disappointingly, and was sent down the shafts to be raised in a Low City compound. The specialist is quietly fighting charges that she paid an investigator to gather potential proof of abuse, which would violate the terms of the rehoming contract CLM had her sign after testing. Her work contract also hangs in the balance, so her wardrobe is flagging as it loads in, her funds focused towards other pursuits than staying fashionable.

It’s all fascinating in a voyeuristic sort of way, this peeking in on strangers’ lives, but two hours of work produce no results: none of these women are what Virain suspects she should be looking for.

“Remove gender and hair parameters,” Virain says with a sigh. In meatspace she rolls her shoulders and pops her back. Among the seven almost fully-detailed figures Virain has created by pulling data and fleshing out their profiles within CLM’s own servers, the other twenty-six from before reappear. “Wrong filters. Give me just those on the makeup team, including on-call specialists, Contena.”

Ten people, three of which she’s already dug into. She wanders between them, trying to decide where to start, when she stops before a figure with beautifully-articulated cybernetic hands.

“Name,” she demands of the data, and the data complies.

Iman al-Nassim is a gender rejectionist, the kind of ostentatious radicalism they can only get away with at 20.1%, a hair’s breadth from being an Akela. No one under 35% would normally be contracted on a Sixer’s makeup team, but al-Nassim has these hands. They sank every credit they had into them, expertly programmed and designed by a Low City chop-doc who probably should’ve been contracted out of the slums long ago. These hands made al-Nassim an artistic legend in Low City and won them an impossibly lucrative contract with CLM— the cees from which they’re putting right back into their exquisite hands, adding and refining under the attention of World-City engineers.

And Johnny’s not doing so good, lately. Johnny needs the best.

They’ve got a shock of kelp green hair against brown skin and gaunt Arab features, and they don’t look anything like what Virain was looking for, but she gets a feeling she’s on the right track. She dives again.

There. She’s spoiled for incriminating footage of them naked and entangled, but there, footage from inside Johnny’s transport to an appointment, four weeks back. al-Nassim’s big claim to fame is the endearing ability to marry speed to precision. They can wipe a face of a day’s wear in three minutes given a moderately smooth road and the right brushes. Johnny’s takes four, a painstaking additional minute taken on the contour, al-Nassim’s pinkie unnecessarily steadying their hand as they draw the line. It’s not a technique, it’s a caress.

Johnny’s eyes drift shut on the footage and Virain realizes what she’s seeing.

“You are a child, Johnny,” Virain says aloud to her empty room.

“Virain—” Contena stutters, losing its accent and inflection as it glitches. “V-Virain, warning, server instance intrusion—”

She spots the trouble in an instant, as the encroaching activity is translated for her as a long, dark shadow. She sprints into Johnny’s cult and bursts out the other side, throwing herself into the node’s walls. She draws obfuscating code fragments close, makes herself look like a defragmentation program, and stops breathing.

Virain’s fingers freeze over the keys in meatspace as she watches Chakrabarti Life Management’s newly-commissioned AI stalk through the server towards where she disturbed its data. A Brahimist cyberpsychologist has to have shaped it. The form is too unique, it had to have been impressed in its very code to translate so distinctly to visuals decades after visuals were likely to be used to view it. Six arms, to start, and powder-blue skin. Where it walks it trails fire, hungry programs to consume intruders. Intention and specialization are picked out in every bead, every digital lotus refracted off the pseudo-fabric of its robes, every haunting chime of the bells at its ankles. Genderless and teeming with eyes, it reaches out for the four make-up specialists Virain so considerately profiled for it, inspecting them. Three hands retract. The last closes around the throat of the data of Iman al-Nassim and pulls them out of the circle around Johnny Dandekar.

Virain exits the server while it devours them whole.

“Fuck,” she gasps as she yanks her trodenet off and leaves it to hang limply around her neck. “I knew entry felt far too simple. Were we identified, traced?”

“Home systems remain uncompromised, escape protocols obfuscated and erased the access origin point as you departed the node,” Contena reassures her. There’s a pause, then, “There may still be time, if we use some of the quieter channels into Hotel Arasaka. Iman al-Nassim is registered as living…”

Virain leans forward and puts her head between her stockinged knees. She forces herself to breathe through the terror. “No.”

“No?” Contena repeats.

“They’re a Dusara. They knew what the consequences of a relationship beyond the physical could be,” Virain says. “I would be willing to wager Johnny doesn’t— or, if he did, the risk wasn’t real for him the way it soon will be.”

There’s a pause. Contena isn’t programmed for judgment, but Virain wouldn’t be surprised if it manifested as emergent behavior, based on the things it witnessed serving her. Finally, the VI says, “Understood. No action will be taken.”

“One God, what an abject disaster,” Virain says. She rubs at her eyes, then at the tingling, sensitive patches of skin where she yanked the trodenet contacts free to break her connection. “I’m going to bed, my dear. File Johnny Dandekar under potential converts to the cause, and run analysis on the other members of his caste. Find me the sympathizer. The real one, this time.”

“Of course, Virain,” Contena says.

//April 17th, 3197, 12:30

h3x is thinking he made a mistake somewhere.

—strong smell of cheap coffee poured from the dallah, black in the tiny cup, offered by large hands with dark hair on the knuckles—

He heaves into the toilet again. At this point he’s run out of nutrient paste in his guts, and is just coming up with stomach acid and spit. He can’t seem to stop.

—half-remembered language, the man says, “أنت تقلق كثيرا يا عزيزي ، إنه ولد قوي بالفعل.”

“यह उसके लिए बहुत कड़वा होगा, आपको इसे इलायची के साथ बनाना चाहिए था।, निशांत.” another voice says, chiding, and you know that one but you’re too intent on the little cup, too ready to sip. It’s so bitter you choke—

Knuckles pounding against the stall door. It shakes against h3x’s back. “Hey, tweaker! If you’re going to die, leave the door unlocked so we can clean you out without having to bill your estate for damages!”

“He’s been in there for, like, forty minutes, don’t think he even booked the stall,” another voice says.

—just six centimeters, okay? Just the dead stuff,” someone says. “I want it to get real long!”

“You’re going to trip over your own hair,” you grouse, running the thick strands between your fingers and pinching to mark the length. You raise the scissors and cut in a smooth motion, so intent on getting the measure just right that you don’t remember where your thumb is until steel bites into skin—

h3x raises a hand and slaps at the stall door until something clicks. It bursts inwards, the corner catching him right in his already injured ribs. He heaves again. One of the men outside, the bunkhouse supervisor, hooks arms under his armpits and hauls him out as he shudders and groans.

“He’s in berth six, I’ll call it down,” the other voice says, a soft voice, and h3x blinks up at the guy from the bunk below his. He looks a lot less miserable looking down on h3x, nose wrinkled in disgust. “If he dies, it won’t, like, drip on me, will it?”

“You’re so concerned, take him to a clinic,” the supervisor says. h3x’s boots catch on the lip of the bathroom door frame and then make two loud thuds as they slide over onto the bunkroom floor.

“Who’s got that kind of money?” the soft-voiced man says. Then he pauses, adds, “I mean, he might, all his computing gear… You know, if I’m doing it to help him out, you’d let me in his locker, right? Just to get his gear out and make sure he’s fine?”

The supervisor grunts and rolls h3x onto his bunk, then thumbs the switch to send it back up on its track to its home slot. “Yeah, why don’t you go ahead and rummage in his pockets, too, while you’re at it? Till he dies, his shit stays secure. I’m running a business, here, got enough problems without CCS rolling up.”

—encryption shouldn’t be this tight, they don’t have the cees for it,” you complain, leaning back in your chair and scratching at the stubble on your jaw. A hand tugs the golden chain trailing between your nose and earlobe.

“You’re just tired,” someone says, “and anyway, you said we’d go dancing.”

“Once I finished up here,” you say, “do I look finished?”

The chair rolls back from your desk as it’s pulled. Someone is laughing, but as you go to stand, give in to a night away from your work, your foot tangles with a thick bundle of cables and you’re going down, forehead catching the desk’s edge—

His compad says it’s been an hour when he can finally work up the strength in his fingers to pull it free from the inside pocket of his jacket. He drops it on his bunk next to his face and blinks against the light.

h3x takes a steadying breath and taps a message icon.

Welcome, h3x. You’re viewing thread “fuck off outta OC space,” with two contributing users.

Virain: A very happy official birthday to you, my sweet boy. Virain: Or so I would say, if it weren’t for the fact someone has hacked a number of fine cybernetic animals at the Lan-se Wildlife Exhibition and conspicuously brought an end to the zoo’s charity day. Virain: The board of directors cites “a free opportunity for a ‘real experience’TM being exploited by nefarious individuals only interested in damaging valuable property,” and I know my favorite nefarious individual’s name starts with an “h” and ends with a “three-x.” Virain: This explicitly goes against my instructions to be quiet in the conduct of your business, but I am interested to know who might’ve hired you to destroy the highlight of a poor child’s month. Virain: I didn’t see any Market jobs for it, though, come to mention, and I find I’m much more fascinated by why you might do that for fun. Virain: Tell me about the Biraran rats. Lay upon my chaise and let it all flow from you. h3x: hel p Virain: I suppose that’s one way to start, do continue. Virain: …hello?

A wave of pain and nausea overtakes him again. h3x presses his face into the foam, hoping the texture will ground him. He doesn’t get dragged into a flashback, but his sense-memory is haywire— black coffee, Calone, hot garbage, antiseptic spray, synthetic jasmine tea, all in a rush in his nose and across his tongue. His fingers spasm over his compad’s tiny keyboard and he sends nonsense.

h3x: dslkfurio293jdf Virain: I’ve come to the conclusion this isn’t an elaborate roleplay scenario. Virain: Pulling your location and taking cameras. Are you seizing? Virain: Not fully seizing, but you’ve looked better. Have you eaten anything unusual today, or come into contact with anyone ill while you were at the zoo? What are you doing for work?

h3x opens his eyes and glances around, eventually finding the security cameras of the bunkhouse, all five, trained on him. He fights an inane urge to wave. Another full-body spasm seizes him, like the one at the zoo, and he’s forced to just ride it out. It’s a long moment of struggling to breathe before he raises his fingers to try typing again. He finds them steadier than before. Small miracles.

h3x: u think h3x: there might be a n egative h3x: interaction between brain damage + h3x: total cog-motor neural overrides Virain: … h3x: specifically like the kind in checkouts Virain: Lately you have been very interested in assisting me with my projects, no doubt because you are growing uncomfortable with the number of favors to me you’re accruing in the course of your escape from Conglomerate space. Virain: I am uninterested in you discharging these debts, so I have asked nothing of you, but I will ask something now: Virain: Tell me you are fucking joking.

—need the best, and feigning disinterest in the situation will not serve you any better than it does the multitudes of wasted minds you rub up against as you party, my sweet boy,” a woman’s voice says, crisp with a World-City accent but tense, near-venomous. You adjust the earpiece and peel the tape off the camera just enough to flip her off in the cramped, smelly vidcall booth.

“I don’t do politics, V, you’ve been knowing that,” you spit. “Got bigger files to archive, and too much at stake to dance with megacorp systems and black I.C.E. just for fun. I ever get so desperate for cees I take up a cause, I’ll back the fuck up, and go hit the checkouts again—

h3x curls up as tightly as he can and groans as his ribs compress.

Virain: Stupid, stupid, stupid boy. Virain: I take back any single note of encouragement I’ve so far offered you on your journey back to relevancy in the hacking scene. Virain: There is nothing left between your ears but a miserable slurry of unrelated facts and ill-conceived ideas, spiced liberally with the worst of human impulse. h3x: stop just stop ok STOP h3x: WHAT IS HAPPENING 2 ME Virain: What you might’ve expected, had you taken the time to fully research the technology involved in checkout work, or asked me to do so, before diving into it cock-first like a teenage boy trying to save up for his first dataslab without content locks. Virain: Shall I elaborate? Virain: Checkout systems construct what is, to be very simplistic, a powerful hallucination through a trodenet interface, which keeps one’s mind occupied while one’s body plies a trade. The system cannot do this without material, and gathering said material can be invasive under the best of circumstances. Virain: Pulling data from a mind that’s only remaining, substantive reserve of memory is likely inexorably linked with physical or emotional trauma no doubt has effects even the crack legal team around the system’s patents hadn’t dreamt of addressing in the liability statement. Virain: Stupid boy. Virain: Aside from apparently triggering a cavalcade of negative memory recall and physical reactions, the trodenet also most probably had to send countless additional electrical signals to your brain to maintain connection and experience fidelity, with predictably disastrous impact on the parts already scorched and twisted. Virain: And then, if I may hazard a guess, Virain: (and I will) Virain: Then, you went and got high.

—if she ever calls again, don’t answer, even just to hand the call off,” you say, quiet and urgent outside the club. The bass is a heavy rumble that shakes you both. “She’s a user, okay, like that guy from Indukaar, she is banned from you, because people like her, fuck, people—

h3x rolls his face against the foam again to shake the visuals, audio, sensations he can feel in his bones, finds it wet. At some point he started crying. All on camera. He wonders if this will be added to the footage she already has, maybe along with footage stolen from Dicer’s.

—people like me—

h3x: how do i fix it h3x: pls h3x: this is h3x: make it stop

—will ruin everything they touch.”

“You’re not like—”

“It doesn’t matter what you think you know, you can’t trust like that, I know, okay, it sounds like edgy cutter talk but I’m serious, you can’t trust anyone in this scene,” you cut in, and One fucking God, but it fucking hurts, it hurts but you have to say it and see in her eyes that she’ll remember it. “Can’t even trust me, are you getting this, Sa—

Virain: There are a number of pharmaceuticals which might help you endure these side effects until they fade and you are able to focus once more. Virain: However, I have no interest in shortening a harsh but necessary lesson about clearing your prospective work endeavors with me first, especially those which involve trodenet immersion— a technology you know I am intimately acquainted with, which only makes your lapse in judgment even more inexcusable. Virain: Setting aside this particular neural catastrophe, you could very well have contracted something sexually which led to a particularly mortifying stint in spaceport quarantine, making all your work to reach said port moot. Virain: I hope there’s still enough grey matter left to you that you recall how terrible for the average ghost an extended period of detention is. h3x: got low city antibodies im fine on that just h3x: this h3x: please, v Virain: Your prolonged drug use and insufficient nutrition has undoubtedly compromised your stalwart, slum-dog immune system, you absolute imbecile. Virain: I have no sympathy for the ignorant, nor for the inattentive. Not considering the possibility of falling ill is one or the other, I’m still deciding which, or whether it’s both. h3x: needed the cees h3x: u k now that ur the one who h3x: didnt have any other options Virain: You’re a very smart young man. I know this for a fact, as in digging for your personal files in CLM’s population archives last year, I saw your preliminary corporate placement results— before you apparently decided the education system just wasn’t for you. Virain: There are always other options for the capable, and you are, when the mood strikes you, very, very capable. I would’ve been happy enough to propose some for you, but you seem too busy trying to find a way to make yourself miserable. Virain: I’m beginning to believe it’s pathological with you! Virain: Do you want to die, even though you bested death once? To suffer more, even though the way you live now is nothing approaching comfortable? Why? Virain: Do you remember, somewhere deep within, that you’ve made a terrible mistake?

h3x can’t take the mind games. He curls up so he doesn’t have to look at the cameras and waits for Virain’s insatiable need to poke and prod and dissect to subside. He’s disturbed by the ping of his compad. He taps a new alert at the top of his screen to find one thousand and five hundred credits transferred to his account from [SENDER NOT FOUND].

Virain: Never turn your back on me again. Virain: If you want to pretend you’ve done all you can, so that you needn’t trouble yourself with addressing the complications that plague your life the way it is now, so be it! Virain: Growth is adaptation, and adaptation is survival. It would serve you right to die in misery for giving up to stagnate, but I have too much use for you, fool that I am. Virain: If stubbornness and pride have driven you to accept any kind of treatment in pursuit of cash, let us take the final plunge! Virain: A combination of sedatives and specifically-targeted adrenergic antagonists should suppress the worst effects of your folly. Look for Calmirin derms and Elevenol at the chemist on the corner of West Horrun and 1st. Virain: The amount I have enclosed will be sufficient to purchase those items, your passage, and even Psych for the journey! Virain: Owe everything to me. Virain: But know one day, I’ll collect. Virain: I hope Ondiat is worth it.

//April 17th, 3197, 12:37

The day is long, with her fertility appointments cancelled in celebration of happy news, and her secure chat silent with h3x in transit. Vivian Bowes stalks the polished halls of her home, wine left below and replaced with a glass of sparkling water for the benefit of her employer’s cameras. A slice of cucumber is suspended on edge in the bottom. She raises her compad to her ear as she receives her first call of the day quite late and watches the cucumber’s perfect balance in her champagne flute be upset by the motion.

“You told them!” Johnny Dandekar screams without greeting, slurring and inarticulate as Reverie tries and fails to suppress his upset. “Y-y-you fucking told them, you dried up c-c-cunt! You t-t-told them, I don’t know how you knew, and they took Iman!”

“Johnny–” Vivian tries to cut in.

“They d-d-didn’t do anything to you, they didn’t s-s-slow me down, there was no fucking reason!” he howls. “I was f-f-fine on my contract, never would’ve reneged! They’re gone anyway!”

“Johnny, pet, listen to me–”

Birare’s most famous man dissolves into sobs. “They made things s-s-slow, Viv, so slow and so quiet without the drugs, so I could think. You had no r-r-right… No right to do this… Where are they, Viv? My agent w-w-wouldn’t tell me anything, said it’d be better this way. But CLM would tell you, Viv, they trust you… Where’d they hide I-I-Iman, Viv? Please, Viv.”

“Johnny,” she finally manages to cut in, with the use of her lower, commanding tone. “Listen to me, now: I have no idea who or what you’re talking about.”

“You’re l-l-lying,” Johnny says, more like a plea. “You’re lying, Viv, one dinner with you, I lose e-e-everything!”

“I should think,” Vivian says, careful in choosing each word, planting what she hopes is a dangerous seed, “the pleasure of serving Birare would be enough for you.”

There’s a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line.

“मुझे उम्मीद है कि आपका बच्चा जीवन के बिना इस दुनिया में पैदा हुआ है।,” Johnny hisses, and hangs up.

Vivian raises her sparkling water in a toast to the sentiment.

//April 17th, 3197, 15:03

“The yellow mustard is blooming in every field,” h3x recites in stilted, ancient Urdu, by the door under the broken bulb at the Lan-se spaceport’s low charge docks.

“Mango buds are clicking open, other flowers too,” a woman smoking a hard-rolled cigarette smelling of nutmeg responds. The crack she’s looking at him through is about two inches wide and she continues in Mandate, “Wow, you look like shit. Going home to die?”

“V said you were a pilot, not a comedian,” h3x shoots back. Two derms and a patch stuck to the inside of his left thigh itch, and he just wants this shit to be done with. He holds up his compad with the credit count pulled up. “I’m paying cargo.”

The pilot snakes a hand with her own compad through the crack and doesn’t open the door wider until the ping of a completed transfer sounds. Then it bangs into the wall behind her as she waves him through. h3x cups a shaking hand over the fabric of the mask covering his nose, trying to further dampen input. The scent of drill fuel is choking in the tight hallway.

“We’re the Handle With Care, dock Q-7,” she says. “Technically the hold is full of desert survival gear, so, we get boarded or inspected, you lay in your crate and think real hard about being a humidity capture screen, got it?”

“Probably be more useful if I was,” h3x mutters. Q-6 is empty and he forces himself not to ask about moving a dock over. “Uh, thanks for all this. You… Got ship system wireless?”

The pilot laughs as they arrive and she waves up at the junky free merchant Handle. “Y’all got SSW, he asks. What does this look like, the Kamua Green? We got a crate in the hold for you to crash in, at a great price— you got any other options, I suggest you take those.”

“Not yet,” h3x grumbles, downloading the seven pages he has open on Istibeesra before he loses access to the net. Page after page on academic testing, integrity maintenance, tech levels, work, and population stats. “But I’m, yeah. I’m working on that.”

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 9/8/2018 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024