Chapter Six-A
It was Monday morning, and Malory was stuck mopping shit from the linoleum floor of a smoke shop bathroom. She was not having a good time. The headband on the mop was old, its fibers ineffective, and it smeared the mess across the tiles. She thought it would be more cost-effective to let a rival gang raze the place to the ground, but she continued. By the time it was finished, the water bucket smelled of quarantined hospital waste, and she was drenched in sweat. She took the container to the alleyway and dumped it. It felt fitting; human refuse was the city’s natural element, after all. Her shift only started, and she had so much left to do. The display cases needed to be scrubbed of fingerprints and grime, the shelves had to be restocked with assorted glass and resin pipes, synth-tobacco bags, and cold beer, and they’d started forcing her to take deliveries from their single makeshift pizza oven despite not having GPS to find addresses. It was all something a service bot could do if they weren’t too cheap to pay the subscription. She used the time after deliveries to take unsanctioned breaks and bury the urge to get on the hypertrain one way to anywhere else.
As she worked, she kept her eyes focused on the back room she was forbidden to access. It was the reason the Black Hands owned the place, a front for one of their many operations, and it taunted her. She’d caught glimpses of server lights and screens overflowing with data and graphics any time a full-fledged member headed back, but she couldn’t figure out the purpose. Any time she’d asked, she’d been stonewalled, threatened, or flat-out ignored. The more they tried to keep her out, the more the obsession grew. She wanted to know their secrets, and she had several schemes in the works that ranged from attempting to hack the optic networks of arriving members, to barging in pistol drawn and demanding answers. As frustration at the lack of her programming progress grew, she turned further into fantasies of winning the lottery, of a long-lost relative bequeathing their fortune, of a little synth-log cabin far from society—there was only so much she could do without her own access to the neural net. Implants cost credits and accumulated reputation, credits and rep cost time working for the gang, and so she was stuck grinding menial labor tasks long offloaded to robots and contemplating escape. The truth was in Oscar’s letter, but she hadn’t wanted to see it.
Her life had become a procession of unending nightmares; she woke in a moldy basement hovel below an automated tattoo booth rented for a handful of credits under the table and wondered when it would be her turn for fame, she ate whatever slop she had on hand, and clocked in to ten hour shifts and cleaned, stocked, and delivered Styrofoam that masqueraded as food to other poor bastards. When she was done, she headed back home, drank ethanol siphoned from industrial solvents until she was delirious, and tried fruitlessly to expand her programming skills. She hadn’t had any contact with her friends—Martin and Spencer were trapped in the same type of hell, Oscar had been a no-show upon their arrival, and she craved a reunion with Nadia where they staked their claim on a better life hand-in-hand. The rest of their cohort had disappeared into the ether. What kept her grinding was the knowledge none of it was permanent: she was going to become a full member, earn privileges and gear, and any credits she scraped together would lead to the city center. She stoked the embers of desire for revenge on New Detroit, the world, for a happiness she was owed. She would not allow herself to break.
That day, when her shift ended, she took a detour to the chapter headquarters to bother the Doc. She rode the monorail up town and watched the people as she waited for her stop to come. Across from her was a bald man with a mechanical jaw. So many augmentations, so much wealth. His eyes, glazed over in a business call, did not register other passengers. His suit was crisp, designer, and she knew it would be easy to slip into his pockets unnoticed. Malory wondered why he hadn’t splurged for artificial hair or if he loved the look of confidence, of power. It was one of the many pieces on her list—she wanted to be able to swap the color of her locks at will, the style, and not have to worry about maintenance and constant cleaning. She daydreamed about being slotted with so much chrome she intimidated the monster in the alleyway, about being renowned in Purgatory, of a celebrity that surpassed Lacey Lantern. Next to her, an old lady pushing seventy was filling out a crossword puzzle with an engraved pen. She didn’t bother with digital displays. Preferred the tactile response, Malory guessed. Everyone had something that kept them sane in the city, and she couldn’t begrudge them that.
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The building that housed the headquarters was gray, solemn, and tucked between an AV dealership and a life insurance firm. The entrance was unassuming, and locked down tight enough to rival a government funded bio-weapons lab. She waited for the facial recognition scan, let the interface prick her finger to test her blood, and keyed in the twelve digit code she memorized on day one of orientation—it only switched to something new if there had been a data breach, and she didn’t think anyone was delusional enough to target a cartel founded on hacking techniques and information extraction. When the door unsealed, she was met with three guards holding sub-machine guns who checked her over. She bit her lip and endured their hands as they searched for weapons and explosives. They seemed on edge, afraid. Above her pay-grade. The lobby was mausoleum-quiet, except her footsteps, every inch encased in patterned marble. There was no warmth to be had, no invitation. The place gave her the creeps, as if idling too long would draw out the long dead to plead for one last chance, so she did not wait. She entered the elevator, pressed the only floor she could access, and headed to the medical wing.
There was no music, just the electric whir of motors and the stomach-lurching descent into the depths. For a moment, she was alone with her sober thoughts, and they drifted toward her mother, toward the grief she felt when allowing herself to remember, and an afternoon they played hide and seek. Malory hid in a pile of dirty laundry and watched between a sweatshirt sleeve and a stained skirt as her mother searched. She held her breath when she came near, and giggled when her mother passed her by. She gagged when the smell became too much and scrambled to a new hiding place—she never won, but the fun was in the process, in the way her mother’s arms wrapped around her whenever she was found, the safety. The elevator doors opened to the sounds of cursing and frustration—the Doc was working, and it wasn’t going well. When Mal walked in, he didn’t look up, so she took a seat on a little stool and watched. His hands were buried in a tangled heap of an implant, all chrome and wires and tubes of treated glass. Behind him, the shelves were lined with cryo containers, expensive surgery equipment she couldn’t recognize, and so many assorted pills, inhalers, and injectors.
“You’re going to bother me until I’m old and gray, aren’t you?” he asked. The Doc was overweight, his long hair swept back in a knot. Both of his legs were mechanical, digitigrade, and left him with an unflattering image of a pudgy owl long past its prime. His hands clicked something into place, and he sighed.
“But you’re already old and gray, Doc,” she said. Her eyes focused on a jar with a suspended human heart, the way it sat motionless, all hope abandoned, and she shivered. “We both know you crave the company, or you would have revoked my access a long time ago.”
“Smart-ass,” he laughed. Another click, another curse, and he gave up on the chaos in front of him. It didn’t seem like an enviable job, but it had to beat scrubbing shit.
“What are you working on?” she asked. She spun around on the stool, eager to ask what she really came for, but knew he’d appreciate an opportunity to vent.
“A piece of hopped-up scrap,” he said. He lifted the thing from the table, let the wires dangle, then dropped it. “Supposed to be Hua Tech’s revolutionary foray into nervous system management. You know, really change the way it feels to be human. One of the higher ups wants it installed tomorrow.”
“Not good?” she asked. It was easy to trust the man. His wealth of knowledge and experience stretched back longer than she’d been alive.
“Overpriced garbage,” he said. He turned round to face her, and his pupils narrowed as she spun around and around. “I wouldn’t install it on my worst enemy. But he’ll get whatever he wants, even if it kills him.”
“Oh,” she said. She stopped spinning, jumped up, and walked over to his work station. All the strands resembled fiber-optic cables up close, glistened like cosplayed crystal in sterile lights. “Planning a murder, are we? Sounds like fun.”
“It does,” he laughed. He bent down, his legs backward at a strange angle, and pulled a slip of paper from one of the drawers. He hesitated to hand it to her. “I know what you’re here for, girl. And you’re going to regret it.”
